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This study exploits a natural experiment to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households could influence their usufruct rights to land via a demographic expansion of the family. The study evaluates the impact of the abolishment of these pronatal property rights on fertility outcomes. By matching aggregated census data before and after the reform with administrative data on the reform, a difference-in-differences approach between reform and non-reform districts is used to assess the impact of the reform on fertility outcomes. The impact appears to be large. The study estimates that women in rural areas reduced their life-time fertility by 1.2 children due to the reform. Robustness checks show that the impact estimates are not biased by spillovers or policy endogeneity.

© 2018 The Authors Economics of Transition © 2018 The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd We conducted a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with real-life tenants in Ethiopia to test the incentive effects of fixed wage, sharecropping, fixed rent, and ownership contracts. The experimental task resembles a common process in agricultural production. The sharecropping contract is a piece rate scheme framed as a profit-sharing agreement. Sharecropping output was about 12 percent smaller than the fixed rent output. Surprisingly, it is statistically indistinguishable from the fixed wage output, despite substantial piece rates. This effect is driven by real-life sharecroppers. Their sharecropping output was smaller than that of non-sharecroppers, especially in a region where a controversial land reform took place. We argue that our subjects dislike sharecropping contracts because of the unfair profit sharing and the disputed allocation of land. Fairness concerns, therefore, may be another impediment to efficiency under the sharecropping contract. ispartof: Economics of Transition vol:26 issue:2 pages:303-331 status: published

During Vietnam's transition from a socialist to a market economy, household's property rights over agricultural land were considerably strengthened through a land certification program. This resulted in active formal credit and land markets, either of which potentially affects consumption levels and volatility. This article evaluates the program impact with respect to consumption outcomes. In particular, it identifies the channel of impact through which improved property rights affect consumption volatility. We find that land certification increases consumption levels for rural households, but also consumption volatility for a subgroup of households identified by an instrument. We show that the certification program affects consumption outcomes of this subgroup through, presumably more risky, credit-based agricultural investment at the intensive margin. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In 2007 the International Labour Organization (ILO) launched the “Microfinance for Decent Work” (MF4DW) action research programme, which was intended to foster the development of innovative financial and non-financial products and services for microfinance clients. A bottom-up approach was pursued where microfinance institutions could propose innovations that promised to have a social impact. The piloting of these interventions was complemented by an impact evaluation. In this article the 17 selected innovations are described as well as the accompanying impact evaluation approaches. Even if final evaluation results are not available yet, lessons learnt during the implementation of the MF4DW initiative seem worthwhile to be made available to other programmes targeting a systematic improvement of microfinance impact.

This research examines financial decision-making not from the perspective of the ordinary but from the extraordinary. Shocks are extraordinary. Events such as excessive rainfall or drought, illness or death of a household member have the potential to dramatically impair household income streams. Shocks to income are shocks to consumption unless households manage to mitigate or avoid the reduction in consumption through the choice of an appropriate smoothing mechanism. Affected households take such measures under the commonly employed assumption that households prefer smooth over fluctuating consumption (due to risk aversion). It is the purpose of this research to analyse household financial decision making after the occurrence of a shock.

One of the central hypotheses of the neoclassical growth literature is the balanced-growth hypothesis, which predicts that output, consumption and investment grow at the same rate. Empirically, this implies that the consumption-to-output ratio and the investment-to-output ratio must be stationary and that consumption and investment must be cointegrated with output. This article tests these implications with respect to Germany, using unit root tests and cointegration techniques that allow for an endogenously determined structural break. We find that the long-run growth path of the German economy is consistent with the balanced-growth hypothesis if we allow for a structural break associated with the worldwide productivity slowdown of the early 1970s.