Concentrating on fundamental sector-level impacts that shape the nature of agro-export growth, this paper indicates how intrahousehold impacts fit into the analysis. Section 1 is introductory. Section 2 puts forward the conceptual framework needed to understand sectoral impacts of agro-export...

This paper explores the productivity and income distribution effects of asymmetric information and risk preferences on the credit market. A model of contract design in the presence of moral hazard is developed in which competitive, risk neutral lenders offer contracts to risk averse agents who...

This paper presents a model that endogenizes asset-based risk- coping in an environment of unmediated risk and subsistence constraints. It uses an individually-rational, stochastic dynamic programming model to explore intertemporal portfolio decisions in an environment in which both yield risk...

The effects of property rights on investment are typically hypothesized to occur through a security-induced investment demand and a collateral-based credit supply. Using a two period model, this paper shows that for farms that are constrained in their access to liquidity, the investment demand...

In contrast to literature which focuses on the how collective action problems inhibit the supply of efficient institutions, this paper uses dynamic stochastic general equilibrium methods to study the demand for institutional innovation. Focusing on the innovation of alienabile land rights in the...

This paper reports the results of behavioral economic experiments conducted in Peru toexamine the relationship amongst risk preferences, loan take-up, and insurance purchase decisions. This area-based yield insurance can help reduce people's vulnerability to large scalecovariate shocks, and can...

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Although rice accounts for approximately forty-four percent of land under cultivation and forty-six percent of caloric intake in Madagascar, most farmers cannot produce enough rice to feed their families. Total rice production increased little in the country during the 1990s, and yields were...

Temporal climate risk weighs heavily on many of the world's poor. Recent advances in model-based climate forecasting have expanded the range, timeliness and accuracy of forecasts available to decision-makers whose welfare depends on stochastic climate outcomes. There has consequently been...

A burgeoning recent literature emphasizes "livelihood" diversification among smallholder populations (Chambers and Conway 1992, Davies 1993, Ellis 1998, Bryceson 1999, Ellis 2000, Little et al. 2001). While definitions vary within this literature, the concept of livelihoods revolves around the...