Over the last decade, commodity prices have registered substantial booms and busts marked by extreme volatility. Wheat in particular, one of the main non-oil commodities, has registered a roller-coaster in price levels which seems to be inconsistent with supply and demand fundamentals. To...

This study adds a microeconomic perspective to the discussion on ethnic diversity and economic performance in developing countries by investigating the motivation for intra-ethnicity marriage in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, the paper proposes that ethnic similarity between spouses...

The paper explores the scope and sustainability of a self-enforcing cooperative agreement in the framework of a game theoretic model, where the upstream and downstream country, Burkina Faso and Ghana respectively in the Volta River Basin, bargain over the level of water abstraction in the...

This paper considers the integration of economies as a merger of populations. The premise is that the merger of groups of people alters their social landscape and their comparators. The paper identifies the effect of the merger on aggregate distress. A merger is shown to increase aggregate...

Increasing water demand due to population growth, irrigation expansion, industrial development, and the need for ecosystem improvements under mounting investment costs for developing new water sources calls for the efficient, equitable and sustainable management of water resources. This is...

The tremendous human resource and economic burden of HIV/AIDS, malaria and diarrhoeal diseases is well acknowledged in many developing countries. Most of these diseases have multifaceted causes such as malnutrition, the consumption of contaminated water or poor education. Thus, cross-sectoral...

In this paper we examine the effects of media coverage of commodity prices increases and decreases on the price of the commodity and how media coverage in other commodities affects prices. We provide evidence of the relationship between media coverage and its intensity to the price level of...

Understanding how producers make decisions to allot acreage among crops and how decisions about land use are affected by changes in prices and their volatility is fundamental for predicting the supply of staple crops and, hence, assessing the global food supply situation. The innovations of the...

In the model of Stark et al. (1997, 1998), the possibility of employment in a developed country raises the level of human capital acquired by workers in the developing country. We show that this result holds even when workers have the option to save

We demonstrate that a rank-preserving transfer from a richer individual to a poorer individual can exacerbate income inequality (when inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient). This happens when individuals' preferences depend negatively not only on work time (effort) but also on low...