Poverty dynamics | Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk and Resilience

Paper: The Economics of Poverty Traps and Persistent Poverty: Empirical and Policy Implications

This paper focuses on multiple financial market failures – emphasising its heretofore underappreciated testable implications, including specific behaviours that are rational only in the presence of a poverty trap.

Presentation: Emerging Issues in the Agricultural Sector

This presentation was presented by David Nyange from USAID describing emerging socioeconomic issues in Tanzania.

Paper: Valuing Asset Insurance in the Presence of Poverty Traps

This paper considers poverty dynamics in a typical setting by calibrating the model to the northern Kenyan rangelands, where evidence of a poverty trap exists and pastoralists have the opportunity to insure livestock against drought losses.

Paper: The Impact of Rural Business Services on the Economic Well-being of Small Farmers in Nicaragua

Relying on a randomized rollout strategy, this paper reports the results of a multi-year impact evaluation that spanned the 5-year life of the program.

Paper: Closing the Eyes on a Gloomy Future: Psychological Causes and Economic Consequences

This paper proposes a decomposition of time discounting into time preference and a horizon function, which describes the extent to which an individual relates to her future selves.

Paper: Do Shocks Affect Men’s and Women’s Assets Differently? A Review of Literature and New Evidence from Bangladesh and Uganda

This paper attempts to expand our understanding of the gender-differentiated impact of shocks on assets through a literature review on shocks and gendered asset dynamics and an analysis of new panel data (2007 and 2009) from Uganda and Bangladesh looking at the impact of negative shocks and positive events on men’s and women’s assets.

Paper: Do Men and Women Accumulate Assets in Different Ways? Evidence from Rural Bangladesh

This paper examines asset dynamics for husband-owned, wife-owned, and jointly owned assets, using unique longitudinal survey data from rural Bangladesh.

Paper: Power and Pitfalls of Experiments in Development Economics

Impact evaluation based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) has in particular fundamentally altered the discourse of development economics over the past decade. This paper illustrates why economic development and development economics will be better served if we can arrive at a balanced appreciation of the essential but limited role of RCTs and experiments.

Presentation: Welfare and Work in South Africa

This presentation was presented by Rebecca Surender from Oxford University describing the Social Grant System in South Africa.