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...

The objective of this paper is to frame the key issues and summarize the current state of knowledge about and innovations in index-based risk transfer products (IBRTPs) as they relate to the management of climate risk for poverty reduction, especially of chronic or persistent poverty. In the...

Risk often inhibits on-farm investment by smallholder farmers. Recent evidence indicates that index insurance and stress tolerant seeds can separately and partially offset this risk effect. In this study, we explore whether the complementarities between these two risk management technologies can...

This paper explores the idea that a competitive seed system may systematically underserve farmers in small, agro-ecological niches, leaving potential yield gains on the table and farmers in these areas less productive and poorer than they need be. We develop a simple theoretical model that...