Mali has many characteristics of a fragile and conflict-affected state. Like many other fragile states, Mali has high population growth, which puts pressure on the country's resources, including food supplies. Gender inequality in the country is also high, with women and girls experiencing...

Mali is extremely vulnerable to climate change and the country is already facing acute climate-related challenges from higher temperatures and more frequent extreme weather events. The impact of climate change has also contributed to a rise in food insecurity, with almost a quarter of the...

Stock-flow adjustments-extra-budgetary and below-the-line operations that do not reflect standard spending and revenue-have added 9 percentage points to the debt-to-GDP ratio in Mali over the past decade. That is just under a third of the total increase in public debt over that period. Despite...

This paper studies a model of diffusion in a fixed, finite connected network. There is an interested party that knows the quality of the product or idea being propagated and chooses an implant in the network to influence other agents to buy or adopt. Agents are either “innovators”, who adopt...

In this paper I estimate income and price elasticities of donations to six different charitable causes to test the assumption that charity is a homogeneous good. In the US, charitable donations can be deducted from taxable income. This has long been recognized as producing a price, or taxprice,...

An extensive literature in economics uses a continuum of random variables to model individual random shocks imposed on a large population. Let H denote the Hilbert space of square-integrable random variables. A key concern is to characterize the family of all H-valued functions that satisfy the...

We study banking with ex ante moral hazard. Resolving the misalignment of the incentives between banks and depositors requires early liquidation with positive probability : efficient risk-sharing between depositors is no longer implementable. In a closed region with a single bank, we show that...

We formalize the interplay between expected voting behavior and strategic positioning behavior of candidates as a common agency problem in which the candidates (i.e., the principals) compete for voters (i.e., agents) via the issues they choose and the positions they take. A political situation...

I discuss the use of simulation techniques to evaluate unilateral effects of horizontal mergers and the pitfalls that one can encounter when using them. Simple econometric models are desirable because they can be implemented in a short period of time and can be understood by non experts....