We study the link between Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) and short-run nutrition outcomes among children age 5 years and younger. We use 2006 and 2010 survey data from Northern Ethiopia to estimate parameters of an exogenous switching regression. This allows us to measure the...

Environmental conditions in early life have known links to later health outcomes, but mechanisms and potential remedies have been difficult to discern. This paper uses the Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) of 2006 and 2011, combined with earlier NASA satellite observations of variation...

Food-based transfer programs have the potential to change diets or alter basic crop mixes. This study empirically investigates the associations between participating in food-for-work (FFW) programs and the diversity of food consumption and production. Four waves of panel data from the Tigray...

We introduce a new method to measure resilience, defined as the ability of an individual, household or community to recover after a decline in well-being. Our approach measures resilience as the extent to which outcomes recover, against the benchmark of symmetric mean reversion arising from...

In the last decades global food value chains have seen the need for increasing vertical coordination in order to secure quality standards. A prominent way to govern the relationships between farmers and agri-business firms are farming contracts. We study the role of trust, risk and time...

In the canonical consumer demand problem, an agent makes a decision about quantities to consume, under the assumption that all possible varieties are available and can be accessed at zero cost. Quantities of each budget item are adjusted to achieve maximum utility subject to the budget...

Books Reviewed include: Readings in Development Economics: Volumes I and II by Pranab Bardhan and Christopher Udry; Agriculture, Trade and the Environment: The Impact of Liberalization on Sustainable Development by John M. Antle, Joseph N. Lekakis, George P. Zanias; Tradeoffs or Synergies?...

This paper studies factors associated with pesticide use in a rice-vegetable farming system in Bangladesh. Data came from a 1998/99 survey of 400 farm households. Regressions were used to examine factors that helped explain variation in patterns of pesticide expenditure. Controlling for farmer...

We measured the farm-level impacts of Malawi’s Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) on fertiliser use and maize yields in central and southern Malawi. Using multiple rounds of panel data and an instrumental variable regression strategy to control for endogenous selection into the subsidy...