Temporal climate risk weighs heavily on many of the world's poor. Model based climate forecasts could benefit such populations, provided recipients use forecast information to update climate expectations. We test whether pastoralists in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya update their...

Trademarks (TMs) shape the competitive landscape of markets for goods and services in all countries through branding and conveying information and quality inherent in products. Yet, researchers are largely unable to conduct rigorous empirical analysis of TMs in the modern economy because TM data...

Uganda's innovation performance in recent years has consistently outpaced other low-income and Sub-Saharan African countries. Though encouraging, this nascent progress will only benefit the broader Ugandan population if policy makers address specific constraints in the innovation systems of the...

CGD non-resident fellow Jenny Aker and co-authors report on the results from a randomized evaluation of a mobile phone education program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which adult students learned how to use mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class. Overall, students demonstrated...

International technological diffusion is a key determinant of cross-country differences in economic performance. While patents can be a useful proxy for innovation and technological change and diffusion, fully exploiting patent data for such economic analyses requires patents to be tied to...

Although there is ample evidence of differences in how and where men and women acquire information, most research on learning and household decisionmaking only considers access to information for a single, typically male, household head. This assumption may be problematic in developing-country...

Economists attribute many common behaviors to risk aversion and frequently focus on how wealth moderates risk preferences. This paper highlights a problem associated with empirical tests of the relationship between wealth and risk aversion that can arise when the probabilities individuals face...

We use herd history data collected among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia to study stochastic wealth dynamics among a poor population. Although covariate rainfall shocks plainly matter, household-specific factors, including own herd size, account for most observed variability in wealth...