The effective design and implementation of interventions that reduce vulnerability and poverty require a solid understanding of underlying poverty dynamics and associated behavioral responses. Stochastic and dynamic benefit streams can make it difficult for the poor to learn the value of such...

The Masters Hypothesis is the claim that unprecedented buying pressure in recent years from commodity index investors created massive bubbles in food and energy prices. A number of recent studies investigate the empirical relationship between index investment and price movements in agricultural...

This study evaluates the impacts on gross revenue distributions of the use of alternative crop insurance products across different coverage levels and across locations with differing yield risks. Results are presented in terms of net costs, values-at-risk, and certainty equivalent returns...

Reverse share tenancy, wherein poorer landlords rent out land to richer tenants on shares, is a common phenomenon. Yet it does not fit existing theoretical models of sharecropping and has never before been modeled in the economics literature. We explain share tenancy contracts using an asset...

It is often difficult to determine the extent to which observed output gains are due to a new technology itself, rather than to the skill of the farmer or the quality of the plot on which the new technology is tried. This attribution problem becomes especially important when technologies are not...

The presence of multiple sources of uncertainty complicates hedging decisions. One of these is the output price and its correlation with input prices. The other is how far forward a firm covers its positions. This study analyzes hedging strategies for grain importers as processors. The...

This paper introduces a simple method of price risk decomposition that determines the extent to which producer price risk is attributable to volatile inter-market margins, intra-day variation, intra-week (day of week) variation, or seasonality. We apply the method to livestock markets in...

The literature on economic growth and development has focused considerable attention on questions of risk management and the possibility of multiple equilibria associated with poverty traps. We use herd history data collected among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia to study stochastic wealth...