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Publications (20)
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...
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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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– 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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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...
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Food-for-work (FFW) programmes have been widely heralded as a means of providing self-targeting transfers coupled with investment in public goods. This paper reviews the changing context that has sparked such interest in FFW, the simple theory that makes it so conceptually appealing, and conceptual...
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Poor households with little or no wealth are particularly vulnerable to risks that reduce incomes and increase expenditures. This book addresses many of the risk-coping strategies for the rural poor, with a focus on micro level and household actions. Largely, these discussions concern risks that can...
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High income risk is part of life in developing countries. Climatic risks, economic fluctuations, but also a large number of individual-specific shocks make these households vulnerable to serious hardship. For example, details are given on the various shocks and events causing serious hardship to...
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It is well known in theory that certain forms of non-linear dynamics in household incomes can yield poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth. The potential implications for policy are dramatic: effective social protection from transient poverty will be an investment with lasting benefits, and...
Displaying 16 of 20 results