Assessing changes in poverty levels over time is bedevilled by problems in questionnaire design, the choice of the poverty line, the exact timing of the survey and uncertainty about the appropriate cost-of-living deflators. In this paper, we focus on testing the robustness of measured changes in...

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Households in developing countries use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support and risk-sharing. These mechanisms cannot avoid that they remain vulnerable to shocks. Public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are meant to...

Most studies fail to find an impact of school inputs on outcomes such as test scores. We argue that this might be a consequence of ignoring the possibility that households respond optimally to changes in school inputs and thus obscure the real effect of such provision on cognitive achievement....

With the overthrow of the Derg in 1991, some 500,000 ex-soldiers needed to be demobilized and reintegrated back into their communities. Successfully integrating such a large number of ex-soldiers is clearly important to social stability. While carefully targeted assistance is necessary,...

Assessing changes in poverty levels over time is bedevilled by problems in questionnaire design, the choice of the poverty line, the exact timing of the survey and uncertainty about the appropriate cost-of-living deflators. In this paper, we focus on testing the robustness of measured changes in...

The paper examines the effects of reform and structural adjustment on the urban labour market in Ethiopia using a combination of cross-section and panel data based on surveys conducted both pre- and post- reform. During this period Ethiopia has seen impressive growth in GDP but little in the way...

To investigate risk-sharing within the household, we model nutritional status as a durable good and we look at the consequences of individual health shocks. For household allocation to be pareto-efficient, households should pool shocks to income. We also investigate whether households can smooth...

Households in developing countries use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support and risk-sharing. These mechanisms cannot avoid that they remain vulnerable to shocks. Public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are meant to...

We use public transfers in the form of food aid to test for the presence of risk sharing arrangements at the village level in rural Ethiopia. We reject perfect risk-sharing, but find evidence of partial risk-sharing via transfers. There is also evidence consistent with crowding out of informal...