Climate variability poses a severe threat to subsistence farmers in southern Africa. Two different approaches have emerged in recent years to address these threats: the use of seasonal precipitation forecasts for risk reduction (for example, choosing seed varieties that can perform well for...

We explore potential effects of index based insurance on common property resources, assessing its impacts on the animal stocking decisions of pastoralists and the resulting impact on a common property pasture. We find a range of potential outcomes. Although index insurance has the capability of...

We study dynamic markets where product safety is unobserved by consumers. Perfect, but costly, audits and an exogenous noisy signal can provide information regarding seller type. Without the noisy signal, sellers do not disclose product safety without auditing. If audits are too expensive, a...

A major challenge in addressing climate risk in developing countries is that many regions do not have the necessary historical weather data to design and validate solutions using technologies such as remote sensing. Therefore, many projects are build using farmer's reported perceptions and...

Are disaster outcomes the sole function of the weather, or do human actions play a role? Many assume that human dynamics matter, but this has not been tested. We utilize the exogenous nature of storm hazards and knowledge of pre-event preparedness by day-of-week to test if there is a connection...