The literature on economic growth and development has focused considerable attention on questions of risk management and the possibility of multiple equilibria associated with poverty traps. We use herd history data collected among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia to study stochastic wealth...

This paper starts from the premise that diversification of assets, activities, and incomes is important to African rural households, in that diversification into nonfarm income constitutes on average about 45 percent of incomes, and the push and pull factors driving that diversification are...

This paper considers the incentives of firms to conform to an exogenous international product standard. Product standardization enables traditional, price-based international competition. But the existence of redesign costs or network effects creates market frictions that diminish the incentive...

This paper takes a new empirical look at the long-standing question of the effect of exchange rate volatility on international trade flows by studying the case of Taiwan's exports to the United States from 1989-1998. In particular, we employ sectoral-level, monthly data and an innovative...

Food-for-work (FFW) programmes have been widely heralded as a means of providing self-targeting transfers coupled with investment in public goods. This paper reviews the changing context that has sparked such interest in FFW, the simple theory that makes it so conceptually appealing, and...

We investigate natural resource-based poverty traps using a simulation model of smallholder farms in highland Kenya. Simulation modeling allows for detailed examination of the complex interactions and feedback between farm-household economic decision-making and long-term soil dynamics, which may...

This paper examines the nonfarm employment choice of individuals using panel data from Ethiopia that covers the period 1994-2004. Non-farm activities that require more resources in the form of skill or capital yield higher returns but employ proportionately fewer people. Women have lower...

The long-recognized spurious regressions problem can lead to mistaken inference in panel instrumental variables (IV) estimation. Spurious correlations arising from correlated cycles in finite time horizons can make irrelevant instruments appear strong with signable consequences for estimated IV...