This presentation was presented by Dr. Elizabeth Mitcham from UC Davis on October 17, 2016 and describes the number of benefits from working alongside Feed the Future Innovation Labs and research into resolving world hunger.

Even when aid is regularized into cash assistance programs, an important question to ask is if there are potentially more cost-effective methods of addressing the problem by treating the causes, rather than its symptoms. This presentation is based on the AMA Innovation Lab projects for the Engaging Universities to End Global Poverty and Hunger Workshop.

In discussing the paradoxical violation of expected utility theory that now bears his name, Maurice Allais noted that people tend to “greatly value,” or overweight, outcomes that are certain. Digging deeper, the Principal Investigator draws on the more recent work of Andreoni and Sprenger on a Discontinuous Preference for Certainty and show that that impact of the rebate framing on willingness to pay for insurance is driven by individuals who exhibit a well defined discontinuous preference for certainty.

The research team describes the methodology used to design the contract and its underlying index of predicted area-average livestock mortality in Index-based Livestock Insurance. The Principal Investigator describes the contract pricing and the risk exposures of the underwriter to establish IBLI’s reinsurability on international markets.

Poverty traps are commonplace in policy debates today, however, when these poverty traps exist what, where, why and for whom are the next series of questions. This presentation is based on the AMA Innovation Lab projects for the Conference on the Economics of Asset Dynamics and Poverty Traps.

This presentation took place in Washington DC, United States on June 28, 2016, and was about means-tested cash transfers emerging as the instrument of choice, spreading from middle income early adopters to lower income countries.

This paper examines the extent to which economic development decreases a country’s risk of experiencing climate-related disasters as well as the societal impacts of those events. The study finds that low-income countries are significantly more at risk of climate-related disasters, even after controlling for exposure to climate hazards and other factors that may confound disaster reporting.

There is a great deal of interest in increasing food security through the sustainable intensification of food production in developing countries around the world. The research team uses discrete choice experiments to study farmers’ preferences for different conservation agriculture (CA) practices, and assess willingness to adopt CA.

In this study, the research focus is on water quality as a vehicle to illustrate the role that the water, energy, and food (WEF) Nexus perspective may have in promoting ecosystem services in agriculture. Drawing on cases from the team's research, they demonstrate how the WEF Nexus perspective—by integrating non-point-source agricultural problems under well-defined energy issues—can highlight central beneficiaries of improved agricultural practice, where none may have existed otherwise.

Rates of adoption of pro-environmental practices in agriculture in many parts of the world are low. In this study the team examines the potential for a recent innovation (the agglomeration payment) to improve adoption of pro-environmental practice in a rural agricultural context.