Risk Pooling through Transfers in Rural Ethiopia

Need-based transfers on a network: a model of risk-pooling in ecologically volatile environments

Growing out of Poverty under Risk: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

The effect of risk on economic growth is a key issue in development but there is virtually no evidence on it and little clarity on what determines the effect. In this paper we use panel data for rural households in Ethiopia to estimate a structural model of household investment decisions under risk. The sample households are heterogeneous in terms of initial capital (livestock) and total factor...

Price Risk and Migration: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

Rural-to-urban labor migration has been occurring even when the expected income is lower in urban than in rural areas, and a stream of literature has indicated that migration is taken as a strategy to manage income risks. However, to fully understand migrations in developing countries, it is important to understand individual attitudes towards all sources of risk, i.e., income risk as well as s...

Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

This paper considers asset holdings in rural Ethiopia. It shows that households own mostly non-financial assets and that the composition of asset portfolios varies significantly with the household’s overall wealth and its exposure to uncertainty. As regards the distribution of assets, inequality is lowest for land holdings and much higher for all other assets. More generally, asset inequality i...

Pooling Risk Among Countries∗

We present a model where the enforcement of international risk sharing contracts is costly. With non diversifiable enforcement costs, welfare is not necessarily maximized for perfect worldwide risk sharing. Some groupings, or “pools” of countries can deliver higher welfare, with higher diversification gains net of enforcement costs. We construct an exhaustive list of such pools of countries. Fo...