Papers and Presentations

Presentation: Horticulture Innovation Lab

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.

Presentation: Identifying Constraints and Innovating Solutions for Broadly Based Growth

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.

Paper: Insurance Contracts when Farmers “Greatly Value Certainty:” Results from Field Experiments in Burkina Faso

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.

Paper: Designing Index-based Insurance for Managing Asset Risk in Northern Kenya

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.

Presentation: Labor Markets and Poverty in Village Economies

About 1 billion people still live in extreme poverty.  With labor being their only outlet, understanding the link between labor market choices and poverty is key to poverty reduction. This presentation took place in Washington DC, United States on June 29, 2016 by BRAC.

Presentation: Heterogeneous Wealth Dynamics: The Role of Risk ans Ability

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.