Pastoralists in East Africa's arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) regularly confront climatic shocks that plunge them into massive herd die-offs and loss of scarce wealth. One of the most puzzling features of pastoralist behavior in times of stress has been their relatively low and non-responsive...

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...

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...

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...

Understanding and alleviating poverty in Africa continues to receive considerable attention by a range of diverse actors, including politicians, international celebrities, academics, activists, and practitioners. Despite the onslaught of interest, there surprisingly is little agreement on what...

This paper introduces a simple, intuitive method of producer price risk decomposition. Applied to a rich set of transactions-level data from livestock markets in northern Kenya, the statistical results prove quite consistent with qualitative descriptions of the functioning of these markets....

This paper introduces a simple method of price risk decomposition that determines the extent to which producer price risk is attributable to volatile inter-market margins, intra-day variation, intra-week (day of week) variation, or terminal market price variability. We apply the method to...