Most sub-Sahara African agriculture is rainfed and the key production risk is crop failure due to drought or insufficient rains. Major strategies for households to protect against the risk of crop failure are livestock rearing and storage of home produced food. Next to drought, SSA agriculture...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on links between domestic financial development and economic growth. It starts with the pioneers in this field and then classifies two main schools favouring liberal financial regimes. First McKinnon and Shaw advocated financial...

What determines remittances – altruism or enlightened self-interest - and do remittances trigger additional migration? These two questions are examined empirically in Egypt, Turkey and Morocco for households with family members living abroad. Results show, first, that one cannot clearly...

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...

The paper studies risk mitigation associated with capital regulation, in a context when banks may choose tail risk assets. We show that this undermines the traditional result that higher capital reduces excess risk-taking driven by limited liability. When capital raising is costly, poorly...

We quantify the causal effect of foreign investment on total factor productivity (TFP) using a new global firm-level database. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting the difference in the amount of foreign investment by financial and industrial investors and simultaneously controlling...

We measure if and to what extent livestock sales during food shortages affect the wealth value of livestock. For this purpose we exploit monthly market prices of meat and staple foods in Malawi, for up to 72 locations (towns, villages and markets), for the period from January 1991 to December...

We study the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on total factor productivity (TFP) of domestic firms using a new, representative firm-level data set spanning six countries. A novel finding is that firm-level spillovers from foreign firms to domestic companies can be significantly...

Using a sample of Australians who display high rates of early school-leaving, we compare the trajectories of respondents who left school at each incremental age between 14 and 17 with respondents who left at 18 years old or more, in terms of homelessness, incarceration, substance use and mental...

We investigate whether US households possess advance information about their future income and what this means for consumption insurance. Based on insights from a theoretical model, we propose a new test to detect advance information, which requires only panel data on consumption and income....