The lowering of trade barriers under the successive reforms of the pillar I of the Common Agricultural Policy, the opening of the commodity markets to an ever greater number of financial actors and the uncertainty created by climate change, amplify both production risk and market risks for...

Payments for environmental services (PES) schemes in developing countries face trade-offs between environmental and development objectives. This tension is inherent in cost effective direct PES since, by their very nature, they limit transfers to recipients. However, where recipients of PES are...

In 1997 Rwanda introduced a re-settlement policy for refugees displaced during previous conflicts. We exploit geographic variation in the speed of implementation of this policy to investigate the impact of conflict-induced displacement and the re-settlement policy on household agricultural...

The goal of the present paper is to test the hypothesis that risk has an impact on inequality. Many studies investigating the behaviour of farmers under risk have concluded that poorer farmers tend to reduce their risk by reducing proportionally more their expected gross margin than the...

We test the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) “polarize” labor markets, by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated workers. Using data on the US, Japan, and nine European countries from...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that there is a huge dispersion of productivity across firms even when industries are narrowly defined. So there is a significant opportunity for the least productive firms to catch up to the most productive. The formers’ convergence could therefore...

Economists have long been sceptical of claims about the 'death of distance' - the idea that new technology has diminished the significance of geography for economic outcomes. Research by Sokbae Lee, Rachel Griffith and John Van Reenen, which looks at patent citations over a quarter of a century,...

Throughout modern business history, contract has been used as an organizational technology that holds counterparties in formal or legally binding agreements. The proliferation of contract prompted the emergence of professional contract managers who played an important but relatively peripheral...

This paper considers the impact of financial contracting on growth by exploring a model where entrepreneurs initially do R&D but subsequently need both outside investors to provide funds for capital investments and outside mangers to operate the firm efficiently some time after assets are in...