There is little consensus in the economic literature on the effects of hurricanes on economic growth. This paper argues that this mixed evidence may result from ignoring the potential for hurricanes to generate heterogeneous impacts within countries. To test this hypothesis, we take advantage of...

Based on empirical facts, we build a model of informal insurance institutions and study their stability. In our setting, risk sharing groups are overlapping homogenous coalitions, originating from networks of historical trust relationships. We derive a general folk theorem that works in an...

In most welfare analyses, especially in the literature on normative inequality measurement, it is a commonplace to assume a direct relationship between the distribution of income and social welfare. As a result, this relationship is formally summarized by a single function, called a reduced-form...

I analyze monopoly pricing and quality decisions under network effects. High quality premium and low quality punishment are found to depend on how the impact of marginal costs on quality relates to the intensity of the network effect and the optimism of the producer about final demand. More...

This paper studies the effects on electoral competition of political parties relying on monetary donations and volunteer labour for their electioneering activities. It also examines whether a recorded decline in party activism increases special-interest influence on party policy platforms....

Consumer concerns in food purchasing contain a number of attributes, including the nutritional and sanitary values, conditions of breeding and selling, and other social issues. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an analytical and an empirical approaches to estimating the marginal...

L’objectif attendu du Programme détaillé de développement de l’agriculture africaine (PDDAA) impulsé dans le cadre du NEPAD est d’accroître le rythme de la croissance agricole afin de concourir à le réduction de moitié de la pauvreté conformément au premier objectif du...

Les émeutes de la faim de février 2008 ont révélé la fragilité de la sécurité alimentaire du Cameroun. Selon les associations de défense des consommateurs, ceci serait lié aux importations massives de denrées de première nécessité, qui aurait pour conséquence une dégradation...

We consider situations where the cooperation and negotiation possibilities between pairs of agents are given by an undirected graph. Every connected component of agents has a value, which is the total surplus the agents can generate by working together. We present a simple, sequential, bilateral...

In order to have the public funds necessary for its development, Niger is examining the possibility of expanding its VAT tax base to exempted goods and basic food products. This proposal has prompted violent opposition leading to the question of the social impacts of taxation. The first...