Temporal climate risk weighs heavily on many of the world's poor. Recent advances in model-based climate forecasting have expanded the range, timeliness and accuracy of forecasts available to decision-makers whose welfare depends on stochastic climate outcomes. There has consequently been...

The Andean Community's Price Band System (APBS), introduced in 1995, had the announced goal of reducing domestic price instability by buffering fluctuations in international prices through use of a variable import tariff. This paper evaluates the effects of the Andean Price Band System on...

Agricultural trade between the U.S. and Mexico has become progressively liberalized over the past 20 years, with significant increases in bilateral trade in many sectors. The rice sector in both nations, however, continues to be highly protected, with producers and millers on both sides of the...

The paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents’ escape from poverty traps. We model endogenous network formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over...

Many governments try to stabilize commodity prices based on the widespread belief that households value price stability and that the poor especially benefit from food price stabilization. We derive an exact measure of multivariate price risk aversion and of associated household willingness to...

Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, and processors and agro-exporters’ agricultural value chains have begun to transform the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework through which to study contracting between...

Empirical studies across many developing countries routinely document a positive correlation between participation in rural nonfarm employment and households’ wealth or income. This paper explores whether nonfarm employment leads to higher consumption expenditure growth in Ethiopia. We find...

We study rural employment transitions in Ethiopia between farming and both low- and high-return nonfarm employment. We find that initial asset holdings and access to saving and credit are important factors for transition into high-return rural nonfarm employment and that households’...

This paper examines the nonfarm employment choice of individuals using panel data from Ethiopia that covers the period 1994-2004. Non-farm activities that require more resources in the form of skill or capital yield higher returns but employ proportionately fewer people. Women have lower...

Index insurance products circumvent many of the transaction costs and asymmetric information problems that obstruct provision of low value conventional insurance policies in developing countries. Recent years have seen tremendous growth in index insurance pilots in developing countries, but...