This paper takes a global, long-run perspective on the recent debate about secular stagnation, which has so far mainly focused on the short term. The analysis is motivated by observing the interplay between the economic and demographic transition that has occurred in the developed world over the...

This paper looks at the integration of regions and nations through the prism of the merger of populations (societies). The paper employs a particular index of social stress. Stylized examples of the merging of two populations suggest that with integration, the social stress index will increase....

Migration from rural to urban areas is common in many low- and middle-income countries. However, temporary migration from rural to other rural areas also occurs and is not well understood. We explore what drives rural people in Bangladesh to migrate temporarily to other rural areas, rather than...

The UN Food Systems Summit 2021 was different from all six previous food summits held in the past eight decades. New features of this Summit included the fact that it was anchored in the Sustainable Development Goals, focused on food systems, was based on multi-stakeholder engagement, had a...

In many developing countries, food environments are changing rapidly. One emblematic trend is the proliferation of supermarkets and other modern retailers. While changing food environments likely influence the types of foods supplied and consumed, research on the implications for people's diets...

We model an environment in which individuals prefer to be in a space in which their rank is higher, be it a social space, a geographical space, a work environment, or any other comparison sphere which we refer to in this paper, and without loss of generality, as a region. When the individuals...

I study attitudes towards risk taking in cases where a person relates to others positively, namely altruistically. This study is needed because it is unclear how altruism influences the inclination of an altruistic person to take risks. Will this person's risk-taking behavior differ if the...

We study how rural households in Ethiopia adapt to droughts through labor reallocation. By using three waves of panel data and exploiting spatial-temporal variations in drought exposure, we find that households reduce on-farm work and increase off-farm self-employment in response to both...

In many countries of the Global South, agri-food supply chains are transforming rapidly. One important feature of this transformation is growth in certain high-value agricultural subsectors, such as horticulture and cut-flowers for export. Growth in high-value agriculture often creates new...

We present a new index for measuring income inequality in networks. The index is based on income comparisons made by the members of a network who are linked with each other by direct social connections. To model the comparisons, we compose a measure of relative deprivation for networks. We base...