After developing a conceptual apparatus, this paper econometrically explores the basis and bias of agrarian growth in contemporary Paraguay, a country where increasing land scarcity and rural unrest have occurred in the midst of rapid export growth. By taking apart the microeconomics of the...

In contrast to literature which focuses on the how collective action problems inhibit the supply of efficient institutions, this paper uses dynamic stochastic general equilibrium methods to study the demand for institutional innovation. Focusing on the innovation of alienabile land rights in the...

Despite striking indicators depicting high per capita Gross Domestic Product together with poor social indicators, changes in the incidence and severity of money-metric poverty in South Africa since 1993 have been a source of debate. Household surveys suggest that poverty appears to have...

Latin American experts demonstrate how market-friendly measures in key policy areas can promote greater equity and efficiency. By identifying win-win strategies, the authors challenge the conventional wisdom that there is always a tradeoff between these two objectives. This volume shows how...

Despite solid theoretical foundations for the notion that poor, borrowing-constrained households will intertemporally manage assets to smooth consumption, the consumption-smoothing hypothesis has not always withstood empirical scrutiny. This paper reassesses the intertemporal asset management...

When natural disasters afflict poor communities that lack buoyant access to financial markets, households face the unsavory choice of reducing consumption in order to protect remaining assets, or selling assets at low prices in order to maintain consumption and nutrition. Both choices are costly...

Impact evaluation based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) offers a powerful tool that has fundamentally reshaped development economics by offering novel solutions to long-standing problems of weak causal identification. Nonetheless, RCTs suffer important and underappreciated pitfalls, some...

This article strategically surveys the past century's literature on agricultural development. We organize the discussion around three "grand themes" that reveal the richness of agricultural development as an intellectual endeavor. First, we explore the role of agriculture in the broader...

This paper reports the results of behavioral economic experiments conducted in Peru to examine the relationship amongst risk preferences, loan take-up, and insurance purchase decisions. This area-based yield insurance can help reduce people's vulnerability to large scale covariate shocks, and...