Starting around 1996, Russia witnessed a strong growth in beer consumption, leading to a fivefold growth in average beer consumption and making beer the most important alcoholic drink today. We use survey data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to analyze individual...

We provide the first quantitative analysis to scrutinize the ample ethnographic evidence that magico-religious beliefs affect the demand for conventional healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa. We rely on the unique case of Benin, where Voodoo-adherence is freely reported, and varies greatly within...

A shift towards healthier diets is expected to address the challenge of providing food security and nutrition for a growing global population. This report explores whether such a shift would also have positive effects on the other two challenges food systems face: supporting livelihoods for...

This paper explores food supply chain resilience and its connection to resilience of food systems more broadly. In terms of availability and affordability, food supply chains have been resilient to a wide range of shocks. Trade plays an important risk pooling role in allowing countries to draw...

There is a growing awareness of the need to transform food systems. Yet successful actions require sound evidence: on the extent, characteristics, and drivers of issues; on the effectiveness of different policy instruments, and their synergies and trade-offs; on how policy proposals would affect...

Assurance schemes (certifications and labels) are widespread in the agri-food sector. This paper reviews the landscape of existing schemes, and the evidence on whether labels change consumer behaviour, and whether assurance schemes achieve positive change on the farm. The impact of existing...

Despite the growing importance of geographical indications (GI), relatively little attention has been devoted to studying the optimal size of a GI region, as well as how lobbying by interest groups may affect the actual size. We develop a political economy model of the size of geographical...