Substantial amounts of debt relief have been granted to a set of low-income countries, as an alternative aid modality. Although the theoretical case for debt relief is firmly established, only empirical analysis can show whether debt relief is indeed a (more) effective mode of aid delivery. We...

Pushed by increasing availability of price data and extensive market liberalisation efforts in many developing countries, research on food market integration has evolved rapidly over the last two decades. Empirical methods to measure market integration diverged in two directions: on the one...

Official poverty figures in Uganda are flawed by the fact that the underlying poverty lines are based on a single national food basket that was constructed in the early 1990s. In this paper, we estimate a new set of poverty lines that accounts for the wid

Human fertility is likely to affect agricultural production through its effect on the supply of agricultural labor. Using the fact that in traditional, patriarchal societies sons are often preferred to daughters, we isolated exogenous variation in the number of children born to a mother and...

One of the main drawbacks of current methods to measure market integration is the assumption of constant transaction costs. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric extension to the commonly used threshold models, allowing us to estimate transaction costs in a more flexible way. We illustrate...

Rapidly increasing mobile phone coverage, cheaper technology, and an open platform that allows for the development of applications that extend the use of mobile devices provide new ways to reach farmers in isolated places. We investigate the impact of an intervention that uses information and...

After two debt relief initiatives launched in 1996 (the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, HIPC Initiative) and in 1999 (The enhanced HIPC initiative), the G7 decided to go further by cancelling the remaining multilateral debt for these HIPC countries through the Multilateral Debt Relief...