In this paper we focus on mechanisms of coordination in agricultural contracts. Our approach is intended to advance understanding of social relations of production and distribution of power in agrofood systems. Through an analysis of contracts between farmers and intermediaries (e.g.,...

It is a commonplace observation that risk-averse farmers ought to prefer less risk. In this paper, we provide three qualifications to this commonplace. First, we note that (properly defined) “less risk” need not imply “smaller variance.” Second, we note that when farmers produce under...

A number of researchers have recently proposed a variety of different 'vulnerability' measures designed to capture the welfare consequences of risk for poor households, and also proposed a variety of different approaches to estimating these various measures of household vulnerability. However,...

“Contractual interlinkages” in the rural communities of developing countries may be a key element of informal insurance when information is incomplete, and may influence the evolution of the distribution of resources. The introduction of “modern” credit markets may undermine these...

Processors, packer-shippers, integrators, and a variety of third-parties engage in a wide variety of different kinds of grading, intended to summarize quality characteristics of different kinds of foodstuffs. There are two ways in which these grading characteristics may be imperfect. First, they...

Rates of long-run economic growth are not independent across countries. To account for this dependence we decompose the spatial covariance function of growth rates into a function of each country's own observable characteristics, its unobservable characteristics, and cross-country spillovers. We...

We describe a measure of welfare, "vulnerability", which measures the difference between the highest feasible average level of utility in a population given aggregate resources, and the actual average level of utility. This measure can be decomposed into two components, related to inequality and...

The notion of "globalization" implies future change, and the prospect of these future changes seems likely to increase the uncertainty faced by poor households in developing countries. In this paper we use data on the changes in Lorenz curves over the last fifty years for a sample of 34 (mostly...

The (closely related) benefit is that we can get by without panel data, using instead only a relatively limited set of data obtainable from repeated cross-sectional surveys of household expenditures, of the sort that many countries conduct in order, for example, to compute consumer price indexes

Over the last several decades, the World Bank has accumulated a large number of datasets from a large number of countries which are based on household-level surveys, statistically representative of the populations of those countries, and which include data on non-durable expenditures. These data...