Numerous national transfer programs around the world are designed with uniform benefit schedules imposed by central governments, but implemented by local governments. The Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in Ethiopia, the second largest safety net in Sub Saharan Africa, is one such program....

This is a draft paper, submitted in advance of presentation at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association.

Small communities sometimes increase their local sales tax rate in order to maintain or expand public services. The question addressed here is what is the net effect of changing sales tax rates on revenues from sales taxes? Using both semiparametric and nonparametric regression, we find retail...

Are working-age rural migrants to urban areas really better off? This paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1979 to 1997 to answer this question. It builds on literature by Fisher (2005, 2007) on the role of unmeasured characteristics in influencing rural residential...

Most agricultural output in the northeastern United States comes from counties that have experienced significant development. A mail survey, with 300 responses, was conducted in southeastern Pennsylvania to determine farmer adaptation to urbanization in this region. Despite development,...

Access to public and private health insurance in rural areas of low income countries is severely constrained by high unit cost of transaction per contract due to information asymmetries between insurance sellers and buyers. This leads to a situation in which the majority of the poor have to rely...

The presentation deals with the quantification of villages' and rural communities' conditions. Distributing financial sources of rural development among the regions is not an easy task. The authors confirm the fact that the results of different methods used for quantifying conditions may be...

This study allows for variation of trade costs among regions, since a single trade costs measure may not appreciate the large number and diverse regions of the United States through which trade in food manufacturing occurs.