Risk evaluation is crucial for practitioners as it allows them to make better investment decisions. However, the recently witnessed financial turmoil has demonstrated the inadequacy of many models for preventive risk evaluation. In particular, it is now evident that new methods are needed to...

This paper analyzes the direct and indirect income effects of international labor migration and remittances in selected CIS countries. The analysis is based on computable general equilibrium (CGE) models for Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. All net emigration countries would...

Donations by migrants to community projects in their home countries ('collective remittances') help to provide local public goods and may promote economic development. We draw on the literatures on migrant remittances and on philanthropy in general to identify possible motives for collective...

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration episode that started in the late 1990s strongly affected political preferences and electoral outcomes in Moldova during the following...

This paper evaluates the effect of AIDS-related mortality on per-capita incomes of surviving household members, using a large nationally representative sample of rural households from Zambia. To minimize selection bias that may arise because AIDS is likely to be the endogenous outcome of...

This dissertation takes a welfare perspective to analyze how rural households in developing countries manage risks ex-ante and cope with shocks ex-post. The first part looks at risk-coping strategies and analyzes the socio-economic consequences of AIDS-related mortality in rural sub-Saharan...