This paper describes agricultural policy choices and tests some predictions of political economy theories. It begins with three broad stylized facts: governments tend to tax agriculture in poorer countries, and subsidize it in richer ones, tax both imports and exports more than nontradables, and...

"This paper describes how governments and philanthropic donors could drive innovation through a new kind of technology contest. We begin by reviewing the history of technology prizes, which operate alongside private intellectual property rights and public R&D to accelerate and guide productivity...

Malnutrition is manifested in various degrees of both underweight and overweight, with large differences and rapid changes in their prevalence and severity. This paper introduces a new approach to characterizing the distribution of a population’s nutritional status, to help analyze changes in...

Understanding what determines the geographic spread of innovations can help guide the funding and implementation of research and extension programs. Our approach uses household survey data as model parameters, to simulate behavior across the entire surveyed population and avoid the aggregation...