Assessing the scope for insurance in rural communities usually requires a structural model of household behavior under risk. One of the few empirical applications of such models is the study by Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1993) who conclude that Indian farmers in the ICRISAT villages would not...

There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a simulation-based econometric methodology which allows us to estimate the model in the structural form...

Using a unique panel data set for rural households in Zimbabwe we estimate a microeconomic model of growth under uncertainty, a stochastic version of the Ramsey model with livestock as the single asset. We use the estimation results in simulation experiments (over a 20-year period) to quantify...

In this note we show that the standard, loglinear growth regression specification is consistent with one and only one model in the class of stochastic Ramsey models. This model is highly restrictive: it requires a Cobb-Douglas technology and a 100% depreciation rate and it implies that risk does...

We use data on a large-scale water and sanitation program in rural Mozambique, implemented between 2008 and 2013, to investigate the complementarities between a behavior-change-based community-led total sanitation intervention and a community water supply intervention. Our findings indicate that...

The One Million Initiative aims to give one million people in rural Mozambique access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation by constructing new water points and providing sanitation training. We use panel survey data for 1600 households to analyze the health impact of the Initiative....

This paper considers a general class of stochastic dynamic choice models with discrete and continuous decision variables. This class contains a variety of models that are useful for modeling intertemporal household decisions under risk. Our examples are drawn from the field of development...

Can project evaluation methods be used to evaluate programs: complex interventions involving multiple activities? A program evaluation cannot be based simply on separate evaluations of its components if interactions between the activities are important. In this paper a measure is proposed, the...

Assessing the scope for insurance in rural communities usually requires a structural model of household behaviour under risk. One of the few empirical applications of such models is the study by Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1993) who conclude that Indian farmers in the ICRISAT villages would not...

There is a growing interest, notably in development economics, in extending project evaluation methods to the evaluation of multiple interventions (“programs”). In program evaluations one is interested in the aggregate impact of a program rather than the effect on individual beneficiaries....