Although food aid may have important medium-to-long term effects, there is a glaring absence of empirical research on food aid dynamics. This paper applies vector autoregression methods to data from 18 countries over the period 1961-95. We find evidence that food aid has a pronounced J-curve...

In the 1992 United States presidential campaign, Bill Clinton and his staff regularly invoked the forceful reminder "It's the economy, stupid!" in order to maintain a tight focus on the core issue that would ultimately decide their electoral success or failure. This initially seemed reductionist...

Little empirical work has quantified the transitory effects of macroeconomic shocks on farm-level production behavior. We develop a simple analytical model to explain how macroeconomic shocks might temporarily divert managerial attention, thereby affecting farm-level productivity, but perhaps to...

Proper targeting of policy interventions requires reasonable estimates of the benefits of the alternative options. To inform such decisions, we develop an integrated approach that estimates the marginal returns to a range of assets across geographically defined sub-populations allowing returns...

Index insurance products circumvent many of the transaction costs and asymmetric information problems that obstruct provision of low value conventional insurance policies in developing countries. Recent years have seen tremendous growth in index insurance pilots in developing countries, but...

The paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents’ escape from poverty traps. We model and simulate endogenous network formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology...

There is a large literature on the estimation of frontier production functions, much of it applied to low-income agriculture. However, much of this literature largely ignores nature's role in agricultural production. Because exogenous, natural production conditions (e.g., rainfall, soil quality,...

This paper explores the empirical relationship between U.S. food aid flows per capita and nonconcessional food availability per capita in PL 480 recipient economies. The evidence suggests PL 480, while modestly progressive in its distribution, is if anything procyclical in recipient economies....

This paper develops a model coupling wildlife population dynamics to endogenous human consumption and poaching behavior in an environment of imperfect labor and product markets and static agricultural production technology subject to environmental shocks. Using a model of the Serengeti...

This paper develops a model coupling wildlife population dynamics to endogenous human consumption and poaching behavior in an environment of imperfect labor and product markets and static agricultural production technology subject to environmental shocks. Using a model of the Serengeti...