2010 AAEA Presidential Address; forthcoming in January 2011 AJAE in shortened version.

The making of projections often requires an economy-wide perspective, and the estimation of consumer demands at the international level. In this paper, an implicit, directly additive demand system (AIDADS) is estimated using cross-country data on consumer expenditures from the International...

The making of projections often requires an economy-wide perspective, and the estimation of consumer demands at the international level. In this paper, an implicit, directly additive demand system (AIDADS) is estimated using cross-country data on consumer expenditures from the International...

Projections of world food demands hinge critically on the underlying functional form used to predict future demands. Simple functional forms can lead to unrealistic projections by failing to capture changes in income elasticities of demand as consumer becomes wealthier. This paper compares...

In this paper we examine the impact of commodity price volatility on nutritional attainment of households at the nutritional poverty line in Bangladesh. We focus on the first two moments of the distribution of nutrition and consider the differential impacts across socio-economic groups within...

A recently developed demand system, nicknamed AIDADS, offers a more general approach to capturing consumption preferences. AIDADS generalizes the LES by assuming marginal budget shares vary indirectly with expenditure. AIDADS is limited by the fact that the subsistence parameters are constant...

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are increasingly being used to project world food markets in order to support forward-looking policy analysis. Such projections hinge critically on the underlying functional form for representing consumer demand. Simple functional forms can lead to...

Over the past few years, interest in bioenergy has boomed with higher oil prices and concerns about energy security, farm incomes, and mitigation of climate change. In the same time, there is significant interest in international agricultural and forestry based greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation....

Climate volatility affects agricultural variability, and extreme climate outcomes have the potential to detrimentally affect food supply and prices in a given country. International trade has the potential to reduce the impacts of climate-induced food production variability, although it may...

This paper seeks to understand the main sources of uncertainty in assessing the impacts of climate change on agricultural output, international trade, and poverty. We incorporate biophysical uncertainty by sampling from a distribution of productivity shocks reflecting the impacts of climate on...