Empirical work in labour economics has focused on rent sharing as an explanation for the observed correlation in cross-sections between wages and profitability. The alternative explanation of risk sharing between workers and employers has not been tested. Using a unique panel data set for four...

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 discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'World Bank Economic Review', 2007, 21, 1-20.<p> 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...</p>

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

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...

This discussion paper led to the publication 'Applied Economics' (2009), 41(24), 3093-3101.<P> 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...</p>

This paper considers a general class of stochastic dynamic choice models with discrete and continuous decision variables. This class contains a variety of models that are useful for modeling intertemporal household decisions under risk. Our examples are drawn from the field of development...

Risk may induce precautionary saving but it can also reduce saving. The theoretical literature recognizes both possibilities, but favors a positive effect (both for developed and developing countries); the empirical literature is divided, reporting (small) positive effects for developed...

Using a unique panel data set for rural households in Zimbabwe we estimate amicroeconomic model of growth under uncertainty, a stochastic version of the Ramsey modelwith livestock as the single asset. We use the estimation results in simulation experiments(over a 20-year period) to quantify the...

There is a growing interest in extending project evaluation methods to the evaluation of programs: complex interventions involving multiple activities. In general a program evaluation cannot be based on separate evaluations of its components since interactions between the activities are likely...