There is a growing interest, notably in development economics, in extending project evaluation methods to the evaluation of multiple interventions (“programs”). In program evaluations one is interested in the aggregate impact of a program rather than the effect on individual beneficiaries....

Most measures of vulnerability are a-theoretic and essentially static. In this paper we use a stochastic Ramsey model to find a household's optimal welfare and we measure vulnerability as the shortfall from the welfare attained if the household consumed permanently at the poverty line. The...

In this note we show that the standard, loglinear growth regression specification is consistent with one and only one model in the class of stochastic Ramsey models. This model is highly restrictive: it requires a Cobb-Douglas technology and a 100% depreciation rate and it implies that risk does...

There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a simulation-based econometric methodology which allows us to estimate the model in the structural form...

Donor agencies and recipient governments want to assess the effectiveness of aid-supported sector policies. Unfortunately, existing methods for impact evaluation are designed for the evaluation of homogeneous interventions (‘projects’) where those with and without ‘treatment’ can be...

This note describes methods for solving deterministic and stochastic versions of the discrete-time Ramsey model of economic growth. We derive an iterative procedure for solving the Euler equation and apply it to an example adapted from Pan (2007).

Using a unique panel data set for rural households in Zimbabwe we estimate a

Assessing the scope for insurance in rural communities usually requires a structural model of household behavior under risk. One of the few empirical applications of such models is the study by Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1993) who conclude that Indian farmers in the ICRISAT villages would not...

We construct and derive the properties of an estimator of welfare which takes advantage of the detailed nature of information about living standards available in small household surveys and the comprehensive coverage of a census. By combining the strengths of each, our estimator can be used at a...

This paper considers a simple Continuous Beliefs System (CBS) to investigate the effects on price dynamics of several behavioral assumptions: (i) herd behaviour; (ii) a-synchronous updating of beliefs; and (iii) heterogeneity in time horizons (memory) among agents. The recently introduced...