Improving quality is an important element of the transfer of production to low wage countries. Higher quality requirements are part of complex contracting arrangements in global supply chains. This paper analyzes how weak contract enforcement institutions and imperfect factor markets are...

This study explores the link between proximity and price cointegration between two markets, where proximity is captured with variables for geographical, political and cultural distance. Linear and threshold cointegration is tested for a set of 756 rice market pairs in 6 West African countries,...

Several recent studies have shown that not only exporters but also importers perform better than firms that do not trade. Using a detailed firm level dataset from 43 developing countries, I show that there are persistent differences in evolution of firms when they are grouped according to their...

Investments in agricultural modernization have resulted in remarkable progress in food production over the last century. As a consequence, the global number and the proportion of undernourished people has fallen significantly. Despite this progress, providing sufficient and nutritiously diverse...

The 1 August 2004 Framework Agreement stated that developing countries would have access to a Special Safeguard Mechanism and Special Products designation as part of special and differential treatment within a new WTO Doha Round agricultural agreement. This was confirmed in the Ministerial...

Microinsurance adoption in developing countries is low, despite its potential to foster economic growth. Recent research is not able to explain the low take-up rates within the neoclassical framework. I contribute to this stream of research by proposing rational as well as boundedly rational...

In this paper, we investigate whether and how households adjust their agricultural practices such as cultivation and livestock to adapt to a severe typhoon.We, therefore, make use of a natural experiment coming from the strong typhoon Ketsana in 2009. We apply the difference-in-differences...

This paper investigates the economic fortunes of coerced vs. free workers in a global supply chain. To identify the differential treatment of otherwise similar workers we resort to a unique exogenous labor demand shock that affects wages in voluntary and involuntary labor relations differently....