The paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents’ escape from poverty traps. We model endogenous network formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over...

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / Barrett, Christopher B. / Carter, Michael R. / Chavas, Jean-Paul -- I. Nutrition, Health, and Human Capital Formation -- 1 Human Capital and Shocks. Evidence on Education, Health, and Nutrition / Frankenberg, Elizabeth / Thomas, Duncan...

1. Uniting on food assistance : the case for transatlantic cooperation / Christopher B. Barrett, Andrea Binder, and Julia Steets -- 2. The challenging path to a global food assistance architecture / Alexander Gaus and Julia Steets -- 3. Food assistance policy and institutions in the United...

Many governments try to stabilize commodity prices based on the widespread belief that households value price stability and that the poor especially benefit from food price stabilization. We derive an exact measure of multivariate price risk aversion and of associated household willingness to...

The concept of a livelihood strategy has become central to development practice in recent years. Nonetheless, precise identification of livelihoods in quantitative data has remained methodologically elusive. This paper uses cluster analysis methods to operationalize the concept of livelihood...

The moral and economic imperatives to intervene in poverty traps motivate the identification of poverty traps and their structural causes so as to inform the design of appropriate policy responses. However, empirical identification remains challenging because of poverty traps' complexity. After...

Foresight and trade-off analyses offer organizations such as CGIAR an opportunity to better prepare for alternative futures through adaptive research strategy and management. This essay introduces a set of papers that explore foresight and trade-off analyses within the context of the major...