Last updated on July 6, 2013
My newest article, “The Welfare Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia,” coauthored with Chris Barrett and David Just, is finally available on the American Journal of Agricultural Economics‘ website.
Here is the abstract:
How does commodity price volatility affect the welfare of rural households in developing countries, for whom hedging and consumption smoothing are often difficult? When governments choose to intervene in order to stabilize commodity prices, as they often do, who gains the most? This article develops an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to answer those questions, along with illustrative empirical results based on panel data from rural Ethiopian households. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility are increasing in household income, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.
By “newest article,” I really mean “most recently accepted article,” for I have been working on this paper since early 2007. Because the paper innovates on both the theoretical and empirical fronts, and because it makes a point of fundamental importance for policy, I think this is my finest piece of research so far.
For a more complete discussion of this paper, see here.