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...

This paper introduces a simple method of price risk decomposition that determines the extent to which producer price risk is attributable to volatile inter-market margins, intra-day variation, intra-week (day of week) variation, or terminal market price variability. We apply the method to...

The Boran of southern Ethiopia have been traditionally viewed as unwilling or unable to engage in large scale, commercialized livestock trade. Here we report on the creation of a new livestock marketing chain from the Borana Plateau to export outlets largely serving the Gulf States. Since 2003...

The PARIMA project has facilitated collective action, empowerment of women, and increased involvement in livestock marketing among pastoralists on the Borana Plateau since 2001. Fifty-nine collective-action groups formed by PARIMA and her partners have been recently merged into market-oriented...

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...