The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transfirmational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes...

This paper provides microeconomic evidence on food security impacts of privately organized biofuel outgrower schemes in Ethiopia. We conducted a household and community level survey and evaluated the impact of castor bean firming. We use endogenous switching regressions to analyze the impact on...

This paper analyzes how imperfections of property rights affect allocation of assets and welfare, using micro-survey data from Bulgaria. Co-ownership of assets is widespread in many countries due to inheritance. Central and Eastern Europe offers an interesting natural experiment to assess the...

The most dramatic recent immigration in Europe is the influx of more than 700,000 Albanians, about a quarter of the total Albanian workforce, in the 1990s. The vast majority migrated illegally. This paper analyses the detfirminants of Albanian migration based on a unique representative survey of...

This paper studies the effect of political regime transitions on public policy using a dataset on global agricultural distortions over 50 years (including data from 74 developing and developed countries over the period 1955-2005). We employ both difference-in-differences regressions and...

This paper uses new poverty data based on household level surveys to analyze changes in rural poverty and rural-urban poverty differences in 23 transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the firmer Soviet Union. The paper presents a series of hypotheses to explain differences across...

As recently as a century ago, one out of two people in Europe was employed in the agricultural sector. Today agriculture represents only a small fraction of total employment in most EU member states. What makes this decline in agricultural employment even more striking is that this evolution has...

It is hard to imagine in the 21st global wine economy, but until 50 years ago Algeria was the largest exporter of wine in the world - and by a wide margin. Between 1880 and 1930 Algerian wine production grew dramatically. Equally spectacular is the decline of Algerian wine production: today,...

European Cup football has experienced a major change in firmat with the introduction of the Champions League in 1992 and a major change in admission rules with direct qualification for multiple teams from the highest ranked leagues in 1999. We show that, in line with popular press reports and...