In the Northern Andes, one of the riskiest agriculture climates in the world, farmers use sharecropping to obtain seed, their most costly input. With survey data from Peru, this paper calculates that the cost of seed, when it is provided though sharecropping, is two times higher than the market...

We study the effects of a conditional cash transfers program on school enrollment and performance in Mexico. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the dynamic educational process including the endogeneity and uncertainty of performance at school (passing grades) and the effect of a...

A household's decision to send migrants is based on information the household has on the expected returns and the costs of migration. Information on migration flows from both family migrant networks and community migrant networks. Direct assistance - in the form of money, housing,...

The practice of mutual insurance is conditioned by two types of transaction costs: "association" costs in establishing links with insurance partners and "extraction" costs in using these links to implement insurance transfers. Data on insurance-motivated water exchanges among households along...

This paper measures the potential of land to generate income and establishes the contexts under which access to land can reduce poverty. Using Mexican household data, we apply nonparametric regression methods to estimate and graphically explore the relationship between land and welfare. Results...

Rural development policy addresses the welfare of rural households and communities. With a majority of the world's poor located in rural areas, the resilience of rural poverty in industrialized countries, and a significant share of environmental degradation the byproduct of rural poverty, the...