Pastoralists in East Africa's arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) regularly confront climatic shocks that plunge them into massive herd die-offs and loss of scarce wealth. One of the most puzzling features of pastoralist behavior in times of stress has been their relatively low and non-responsive...

Understanding and alleviating poverty in Africa continues to receive considerable attention by a range of diverse actors, including politicians, international celebrities, academics, activists, and practitioners. Despite the onslaught of interest, there surprisingly is little agreement on what...

This paper introduces a simple, intuitive method of producer price risk decomposition. Applied to a rich set of transactions-level data from livestock markets in northern Kenya, the statistical results prove quite consistent with qualitative descriptions of the functioning of these markets....

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 terminal market price variability. We apply the method to...

This paper uses detailed, transactions-level data and an innovative, structural heteroskedasticity-in-mean estimation method to identify the determinants of livestock producer prices for pastoralists in the drylands of northern Kenya. The empirical results confirm the importance of animal...