Many governments try to stabilize commodity prices based on the widespread belief that households value price stability and that the poor especially benefit from food price stabilization. We derive an exact measure of multivariate price risk aversion and of associated household willingness to...

Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, and processors and agro-exporters' agricultural value chains have begun to transform the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework through which to study contracting between...

Pastoralists in East Africa's arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) regularly confront climatic shocks triggering massive herd die-offs and loss of scarce wealth. On the surface, it appears puzzling that pastoralists do not make extensive use of livestock markets to offload animals when climatic...

Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, processors, and agro-exporters are transforming the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework with which to study contracting between smallholders and a commodity-processing...

Reverse share tenancy, wherein poorer landlords rent out land to richer tenants on shares, is a common phenomenon. Yet it does not fit existing theoretical models of sharecropping and has never before been modeled in the economics literature. We explain share tenancy contracts using an asset...

The inverse productivity-size relationship is one of the oldest puzzles in development economics. Two conventional explanations for the inverse relationship have emerged in the literature: (i) factor market imperfections that cause cross-sectional variation in household-specific shadow prices...