Much recent empirical work on intra-household allocation uses the axiomatic Nash Bargaining model to make predictions about how the distribution of consumption within the household will respond to individuals' income shocks. However, one of the basic axioms underlying this approach is that...

An agency model of contracts used in California's processing‐tomato industry is estimated in three stages. We first estimate growers' stochastic production possibilities, and then, for a given vector of preference parameters, compute an optimal compensation schedule. Finally, we compare...

Traditional poverty measures neglect several important dimensions of household welfare. In this paper we construct a measure of ‘vulnerability’ which allows us to quantify the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as the loss associated with any of a variety of different sources of...

Agricultural cooperatives have long played an important role in helping their members manage risk. Yet the typical cooperative does a much better job of helping their members manage some sorts of risk than it does others. In particular, co-ops are good at helping members manage marketing risk,...

Using data on individual consumption expenditures from a sample of farm households in the Philippines, we construct a direct test of the risk-sharing implications of the collective house-hold model. We are able to contrast the efficient outcomes predicted by the collective household model with...

What motivates people in rural villages to share? We first elicit a baseline level of sharing using a standard, anonymous dictator game. Then using variants of the dictator game that allow for either revealing the dictator's identity or allowing the dictator to choose the recipient, we attribute...

In this paper we focus on mechanisms of coordination in agricultural contracts. Our approach is intended to advance understanding of social relations of production and distribution of power in agrofood systems. Through an analysis of contracts between farmers and intermediaries (e.g.,...

It is a commonplace observation that risk-averse farmers ought to prefer less risk. In this paper, we provide three qualifications to this commonplace. First, we note that (properly defined) “less risk” need not imply “smaller variance.” Second, we note that when farmers produce under...

A number of researchers have recently proposed a variety of different 'vulnerability' measures designed to capture the welfare consequences of risk for poor households, and also proposed a variety of different approaches to estimating these various measures of household vulnerability. However,...

“Contractual interlinkages” in the rural communities of developing countries may be a key element of informal insurance when information is incomplete, and may influence the evolution of the distribution of resources. The introduction of “modern” credit markets may undermine these...