We use data on a large-scale water and sanitation program in rural Mozambique, implemented between 2008 and 2013, to investigate the complementarities between a behavior-change-based community-led total sanitation intervention and a community water supply intervention. Our findings indicate that...

This note describes methods for solving deterministic and stochastic versions of the discrete-time Ramsey model of economic growth. We derive an iterative procedure for solving the Euler equation and apply it to an example adapted from Pan (2007)

The One Million Initiative aims to give one million people in rural Mozambique access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation by constructing new water points and providing sanitation training. We use panel survey data for 1600 households to analyze the health impact of the Initiative....

This paper considers a general class of stochastic dynamic choice models with discrete and continuous decision variables. This class contains a variety of models that are useful for modeling intertemporal household decisions under risk. Our examples are drawn from the field of development...

In this note we show that the standard, loglinear growth regression specificationis consistent with one and only one model in the class of stochastic Ramsey models. Thismodel is highly restrictive: it requires a Cobb-Douglas technology and a 100% depreciationrate and it implies that risk does...

There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a simulation-based econometric methodology which allows us to estimate the model in the structural form...

Using a unique panel data set for rural households in Zimbabwe we estimate amicroeconomic model of growth under uncertainty, a stochastic version of the Ramsey modelwith livestock as the single asset. We use the estimation results in simulation experiments(over a 20-year period) to quantify the...

Most measures of vulnerability are a-theoretic and essentially static. In this paper we use a stochastic Ramsey model to find a household's optimal welfare and we measure vulnerability as the shortfall from the welfare attained if the household consumed permanently at the poverty line. The...

Assessing the scope for insurance in rural communities usually requires a structural model of household behavior under risk. One of the few empirical applications of such models is the study by Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1993) who conclude that Indian farmers in the ICRISAT villages would not...

Donor agencies and recipient governments want to assess the effectiveness of aid-supported sector policies. Unfortunately, existing methods for impact evaluation are designed for the evaluation of homogeneous interventions (‘projects’) where those with and without ‘treatment’ can be...