The effective design and implementation of interventions that reduce vulnerability and poverty require a solid understanding of underlying poverty dynamics and associated behavioral responses. Stochastic and dynamic benefit streams can make it difficult for the poor to learn the value of such...

We introduce a fast and inexpensive method to rule out potential barriers to adopting a technology. We use this method to asses the role of exogeneous contract enforcement as a barrier to market for Kenya's French Bean export market. We survey 240 farmers in Kirinyaga County, Kenya who were...

How large are potential benefits from global risksharing? In order to answer this question we propose a new methodology that is closely connected with the empirical growth literature. We obtain estimates of residual risk (growth uncertainty) at various horizons from regressions of...

This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

This paper examines the supply response of the Greek pork market. A GARCH process isused to estimate expected price and price volatility, while price and supply equations areestimated jointly. In addition to the standard GARCH model, several different symmetric,asymmetric, and nonlinear GARCH...

This paper presents preliminary results on the possible demand for weather insurance in China. Results from 1,564 farm households from Western and Central China between October 2007 and October 2008 suggest that the greater risk for farmers is drought followed by excessive rain. Heat is less...

The civil war in Côte d’Ivoire has caused an increase in household size due to returnees and a decrease in remittance received in rural Burkina Faso. This paper, taking advantage of a rare dataset covering the covariate shocks caused by the Ivorian Crisis, examines empirically the impact of...

This paper is Selected for presentation at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, Georgia, January 31-February 3, 2009. The research is partially funded by ERS/USDA China Project and Social Science Fund of Jiangsu Province in China. The authors are grateful for...

Standard models of management of a single-species fishery generally assume that the biomass is of known size and that it is generated by a well-specified deterministicgrowth law. In reality the biomass is of uncertain size and usually subject to random growth. Several authors have addressed the...

This paper explores the factors that impact insurance choices. Specially designed survey questions allow one to fully observe the demand tendency by the farmers and partially observe the supply tendency by the insurance company. A joint estimation of insurance decision by both supply and demand...