The goal of the present paper is to test the hypothesis that risk has an impact on inequality. Many studies investigating the behaviour of farmers under risk have concluded that poorer farmers tend to reduce their risk by reducing proportionally more their expected gross margin than the...

The lowering of trade barriers under the successive reforms of the pillar I of the Common Agricultural Policy, the opening of the commodity markets to an ever greater number of financial actors and the uncertainty created by climate change, amplify both production risk and market risks for...

Payments for environmental services (PES) schemes in developing countries face trade-offs between environmental and development objectives. This tension is inherent in cost effective direct PES since, by their very nature, they limit transfers to recipients. However, where recipients of PES are...

In 1997 Rwanda introduced a re-settlement policy for refugees displaced during previous conflicts. We exploit geographic variation in the speed of implementation of this policy to investigate the impact of conflict-induced displacement and the re-settlement policy on household agricultural...

Duality methods of linear and convex programming are applied to impute definite marginal values to the fixed inputs of a hydroelectric plant from the operating profit. Our earlier analysis of pumped storage (of energy and other cyclically priced goods) is thus extended to valuation of an...

This paper presents annual estimates of fixed capital stocks and capital services for the United Kingdom, 1950-2013, for the whole economy and for the market sector. Our estimates cover eight asset types (structures, machinery, vehicles, computers, purchased software, own-account software,...

We apply duality methods of linear and convex programming to the problems of operation and rental valuation of facilities for conversion and storage of cyclically priced goods, e.g. , energy. Both problems are approached by shadow-pricing the stock (which is a purely intermediate commodity); and...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that there is a huge dispersion of productivity across firms even when industries are narrowly defined. So there is a significant opportunity for the least productive firms to catch up to the most productive. The formers’ convergence could therefore...

This Paper shows how microeconomic data on investment plans can be used to study the structure of risk faced by firms. Revisions of investment plans form a martingale, and thus reveal the underlying shocks driving investment. We decompose revisions in investment plans into micro, sector and...

This paper documents the delayed adoption of a major technological innovation: the adoption of the diesel locomotive in the US railway industry. Contrary to other instances of major technological innovations, the delay in the adoption of the diesel locomotive was not associated with an initial...