infonet-economy

This book investigates if and how agricultural market structures and farm constraints affect the development of dynamic food and cash crop sectors and whether these sectors can contribute to economic transformation and poverty reduction in Africa. The authors map the current cash and food crops supply chains in six African countries, characterizing their markets structures and...

In countries where rain-fed agriculture constitutes a significant portion of household livelihood, increased weather variability represents a source of vulnerability to stable consumption, food security and household well-being. Weather induced income changes affect household consumption and saving decisions. We evaluate saving and consumption responses to weather variation in South...

This paper investigates how welfare losses for facing risks change as a function of the number of risk exposures. To that aim, we define the risk apportionment of order n (RA-n) utility premium as a measure of pain associated with facing the passage from one risk to a riskier one. Changes in risks are expressed through the specific concept of stochastic dominance of order n defined...

Does the presence of immigrants in one's neighborhood affect voting for far right-wing parties? We study the case of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) that, under the leadership of Jörg Haider, increased its vote share from less than 5% in the early 1980s to 27% by the end of the 1990s and continued to attract more than 20% of voters in the 2013 national election. We find that...

Bommier, Antoine; Bretschger, Lucas; Le Grand, François

This paper shows how asymptotically valid inference in regression models based on the weighted least squares (WLS) estimator can be obtained even when the model for reweighting the data is misspecified. Like the ordinary least squares estimator, the WLS estimator can be accompanied by heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC) standard errors without knowledge of the functional form of...

It is shown that the n-player lottery contest admits a best-response potential (Voorneveld, 2000, Economics Letters). This is true also when the contest technology reflects the possibility of a draw. The result implies, in particular, the existence of a non-trivial two-player zero-sum game that is best-response equivalent to a game with identical payoff functions.