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Publications (24)
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This paper analyzes the short-term effects of foreign capital flows on aggregate demand in Mexico: their magnitude, transmission channels, and the possible influence of the country’s choice of exchange rate regime. The study is motivated by the introduction of a floating system in December 1994, in...
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Households in developing countries use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support and risk-sharing. These mechanisms cannot avoid that they remain vulnerable to shocks. Public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are meant to...
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In this paper we review the evidence on the impact of large shocks, such as drought, on child and adult health, with particular emphasis on Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. Our focus is on the impact of shocks on long-term outcomes, and we ask whether there are intrahousehold differences in these effects. The...
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Using panel data, this paper explores the effects of openness to international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. Fixed-effect and adjusted fixed-effect (regional-effect) estimations yield results consistent with the hypothesis of conditional convergence. FDI has a...
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– The Director's Cut
Traditional poverty measures neglect several important dimensions of household welfare. In this paper we construct a measure of ‘vulnerability’ which allows us to quantify the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as the loss associated with any of a variety of different sources of...
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We use public transfers in the form of food aid to test for the presence of risk sharing arrangements at the village level in rural Ethiopia. We reject perfect risk-sharing, but find evidence of partial risk-sharing via transfers. There is also evidence consistent with crowding out of informal...
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– An Analysis of Knowledge Diffusion in Academic Journals
The thought that the academy might function like a ‘market place for ideas’ has been influential in the economics of science and is increasingly so in the philosophy of science/economic methodology literature. This paper contributes to this literature by examining one respect in which the academy...
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– An Econometric Study
The objectives of this paper are to examine the impact of liberalization on trade deficits and current accounts for developing economies. Attempts at liberalization in trade could lead to an increase in imports in the short run and this could cause both trade and current account deficits in...
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Many argue that poverty is intimately linked with ‘vulnerability’. Still, there is no consensus about how to define and measure ‘vulnerability’. We review theory and describe strengths and limits of recently proposed measures. We then propose a definition of vulnerability and develop a general...
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In economic literature insurance networks are often treated as exogenous institutions. Frequently, the assumption is made that some clearly identifiable group (e.g. ‘the whole village’ or ‘the extended family’) constitutes an insurance network. Still, theory suggests that the formation of insurance...
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– Learning from Visa®?
We examine a simple extension to existing credit contacts for the poor (‘microfinance contracts’), that would allow financial institutions to provide repayment insurance to their clients. The proposed contract uses the repeated nature of loans to build credit records that borrowers in good standing...
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– Testing Theories of Risk-Sharing in the ICRISAT Study Region of South India
Panel data from villages in rural south India have been used for leading econometric studies on risk-sharing in village economies. The work has influenced debate on safety net design world-wide and has driven scholarly agendas on household economics. This paper critically surveys work to date and...
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The paper considers the macroeconomic impact of shocks to agricultural output and of negative and positive price shocks. It is shown that negative price shocks have particularly large externalities: it is estimated that the overall impact of these negative shocks on GDP may well be double their...
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This paper proposes to organize thinking about the opportunities for improving and extending financial markets and safety nets for the poor, by focusing on factors that may explain why the linkage of local financial networks and safety nets with the larger economy often fails or is incomplete...
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Customary rules governing access to land and other natural resources in village societies have characteristics that allow them to fulfill social security functions and achieve equity objectives. This is true of both common-property resources and land parcels held under individualized tenure. However...
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– Inclusion and Exclusion in Mutual Insurance Networks in Southern Ghana
Mutual insurance has been shown, theoretically and empirically, to be incomplete and limited by asymmetric information and lack of enforcement mechanisms. While some research has shown that networks based on kinship, neighbourhood and ethnicity may provide a locus of insurance and thus a way of...
Displaying 16 of 24 results