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Publications (34)
Working Paper
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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...
Working Paper
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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...
WIDER Symposium on Adaptive Efficiency and Evolving Diversity of Enterprise Ownership and Governance
A property rights regime covers rights to use, lease, donate, bequest, and sell assets or collect the incomes generated by assets. A clear and transparent property rights regime facilitates investment and economic growth. While private property is considered by many to be the most superior type of...
Working Paper
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– The Economics of La Lega and Mondragón
This paper develops a theory of endogenous league formation and considers its implications for policy in developing countries. We generalize from features of the two most prominent European co-op leagues, Mondragón and La Lega, to develop the first formal model of the endogenous formation of co...
Working Paper
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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...
Working Paper
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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...
Working Paper
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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...
Working Paper
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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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– Evidence from East Asia
This paper investigates the benefits and associated agency costs of using internal capital markets through affiliating with groups using data of two thousand firms from nine East Asian economies between 1994-6. We find that mature and slow-growing firms with ownership structures more likely to...
Working Paper
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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...
Working Paper
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– Evidence for Italian Public Enterprises' Investment
This study examines the effect of the hardening of the budget constraint on the investment behaviour of Italian state owned enterprises (SOEs). It carries out a natural experiment that exploits the 1987 shift of budget regimes due to the pressure of European Union economic policies on the Italian...
Working Paper
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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...
Working Paper
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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 34 results