In the pastoral and agropastoral systems of east Africa's arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL), climatic shocks, price volatility, disease outbreaks, and widespread violence beget frequent, severe disruption of already-fragile livelihoods. The past year's drought dramatically demonstrates that...

Estimating risk preferences is tricky because controlling for confounding factors is difficult. Omitting or imperfectly controlling for these factors can attribute too much observable behavior to risk aversion and bias estimated preferences. Agents often modify risky decisions in response to...

Weather-related shocks are a major threat to the health and livelihoods of vulnerable farmers and herders in low-income, arid, and semi-arid regions of the world. Index insurance represents a promising tool for mitigating the impacts of such risk but in practice has exhibited low uptake rates by...