David Stifel
Lafayette College, Economics, Faculty Member
In this paper, the author assesses the conditions in the rural labor markets in Madagascar in an effort to better understand poverty there. In doing so, the author focus our attention on labor outcomes in the context of household... more
In this paper, the author assesses the conditions in the rural labor markets in Madagascar in an effort to better understand poverty there. In doing so, the author focus our attention on labor outcomes in the context of household livelihood strategies that include farm and non-farm income earning opportunities. The author identify distinct household livelihood strategies that can be ordered in welfare terms, and estimate multinomial logit models to assess the extent to which there exist barriers to choosing dominant strategies. Individual employment choice models, as well as estimates of earnings functions, provide supporting evidence of these barriers.
Research Interests: Economics, Labor Economics, Accounting, Capital Markets, Housing, and 15 moreFinancial Markets, Mobility, Primary Education, Inequality, Insurance, Agricultural Productivity, Externalities, Agricultural Production, Interest Rates, Land Ownership, Entry Barriers, Risk Reduction, Description, Allocative Efficiency, and Market Failures
We estimate the impact of improved market access on household well-being and nutrition using a quasi-experimental setting in Ethiopia. We find that households in remote areas consume substantially less than households nearer to markets,... more
We estimate the impact of improved market access on household well-being and nutrition using a quasi-experimental setting in Ethiopia. We find that households in remote areas consume substantially less than households nearer to markets, they are more food insecure, and their school enrollment rates are lower. Although their diets are also less diverse, we find no significant differences in anthropometric measures. Part of these welfare differences can be attributed to lower household agricultural production in remote areas. But agricultural production differences alone do not account for all of the differences in household consumption levels for remote households. An additional contributing factor is the deteriorating terms of trade for remote households that negatively affect both the size of the agricultural surplus that these households market and the quantity of food items that they purchase. Reducing transaction costs associated with poor rural infrastructure can pay important ...
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The number of students flowing from low-income countries to high-income countries has grown over the past several decades but is likely to fall substantially in the coming years due to the coronavirus pandemic. To gauge the potential... more
The number of students flowing from low-income countries to high-income countries has grown over the past several decades but is likely to fall substantially in the coming years due to the coronavirus pandemic. To gauge the potential impact of the coronavirus-induced reduction in the international flow of student migrants, we estimate the pre-pandemic effects of student migration from 122 low- and middle-income countries to French- and English-speaking high-income countries on the economic growth of the sending countries. Using region fixed-effects and instrumental-variables estimators to address the potential endogeneity of student-migrant flows, we find positive and statistically significant effects of student migration on per capita GDP in sending countries. These findings are robust to different time lags, and are increasing over time. Our results indicate that student migrants have a modest but meaningful impact on the short-run economic growth of their home countries. In terms...
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This paper estimates structural labor demand equations separately for farm and non-farm enterprises in rural Madagascar. We adapt recent labor supply estimation methods that address the general unobservability of both wage rates – due to... more
This paper estimates structural labor demand equations separately for farm and non-farm enterprises in rural Madagascar. We adapt recent labor supply estimation methods that address the general unobservability of both wage rates – due to widespread selfemployment – and employers’ non-wage costs of hiring workers in order to fill a significant void in the existing literature. Labor demand in rural Madagascar appears strongly increasing in enterprise owners’ educational attainment, in enterprises’ capital stock, and in communitylevel public goods. Furthermore, labor demand appears wage inelastic, especially in the non-farm sector where government labor market policies, such as minimum wage laws, are more commonly enforced. a USAID Madagascar b Department of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University. c Department of Economics, Lafayette College * David Stifel (stifeld@lafayette.edu) is the corresponding author. The authors would like to thank the Institut National de la Stat...
Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track... more
Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track consumption correlates as opposed to consumption itself have been developed to overcome such data gaps. These methods typically assume that the estimated relation between consumption and its predictors is stable over time—assumptions that usually cannot be tested directly. This study analyses the performance of poverty prediction models based on small area estimation (SAE) techniques. Predicted poverty estimates are compared to directly observed levels in a series of country settings that are widely divergent, but where data comparability over time is not judged to be a problem. Prediction models that employ either nonfood expenditures or a full set of assets as predictors, yield poverty estimates that match observed poverty fairly closely. This offers some ...
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There has long been concern that cash and in-kind transfers might affect prices in developing country food markets. While there have been a number of studies at highly aggregated levels, much less is known about the effects of cash... more
There has long been concern that cash and in-kind transfers might affect prices in developing country food markets. While there have been a number of studies at highly aggregated levels, much less is known about the effects of cash transfers on local food prices and even less about how they compare to food transfers. We consider this issue in the context of a large social protection intervention, Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme. Using 12 months of price data from 233 localities and controlling for temporal, location, and market characteristics we find: Cash transfers have no effect on food prices. There is some evidence that food transfers reduce food prices. Maize transfers reduce aggregate grain prices, wheat transfers reduce the price of maize, and the negative effect of food transfers on food prices is larger in more remote markets. However, the magnitudes of these effects are trivially small, both in absolute and percentage terms.
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We study cereal wholesale markets in Ethiopia in the last decade (2001–2011), a period that has been characterized by important local changes affecting agricultural markets, including strong economic growth, urbanization, improved road... more
We study cereal wholesale markets in Ethiopia in the last decade (2001–2011), a period that has been characterized by important local changes affecting agricultural markets, including strong economic growth, urbanization, improved road and communication infrastructure, an increase in importance of cooperatives and commercial farms, and a doubling in commercial surplus. We find that these changes are associated with significant declines in real price differences between supplying and receiving markets, in cereal milling margins, as well as in retail margins. Important improvements have thus happened in the last decade in Ethiopia’s food marketing system, traditionally identified as a major cause of food security problems in the country.
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The U.S. faces two types of childhood malnutrition – the prevalence of overweight children has increased dramatically over the past two decades and the degree of underweight has been unacceptably high. Both forms of malnutrition create... more
The U.S. faces two types of childhood malnutrition – the prevalence of overweight children has increased dramatically over the past two decades and the degree of underweight has been unacceptably high. Both forms of malnutrition create public health problems. Less is known about how childhood overor underweight affects a child’s cognitive functioning. We use data from the children of the NLSY79 to investigate the cognitive consequences of child malnutrition. We use several estimation methods to control for various forms of endogeneity. Our results suggest that malnourished children tend have lower cognitive abilities when compared to well-nourished children.
This report assesses labor market conditions in Madagascar between 2001 and 2005. Labor markets are the focus here because poor people derive most of their income from their own largely unskilled labor - the one asset that they possess in... more
This report assesses labor market conditions in Madagascar between 2001 and 2005. Labor markets are the focus here because poor people derive most of their income from their own largely unskilled labor - the one asset that they possess in abundance (World Bank, 1990). Thus in a country like Madagascar where nearly seven out of ten individuals live below the poverty line (INSTAT, 2006), understanding employment and earnings conditions is essential to understanding poverty. Further, the functioning of the labor market has important implication for economic efficiency, growth and poverty reduction. On the one hand, well functioning labor markets can both facilitate growth through efficient allocation of resources, and allow the poor to share in opportunities created by economic growth. On the other hand, poorly functioning labor markets can inhibit both.
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Using an equivalent variation approach, we estimate households’ willingness-to-pay for rural feeder roads in Ethiopia. The problem of endogenous road placement is addressed by a purposeful data collection process as the survey site was... more
Using an equivalent variation approach, we estimate households’ willingness-to-pay for rural feeder roads in Ethiopia. The problem of endogenous road placement is addressed by a purposeful data collection process as the survey site was chosen in such a way that the primary difference between households in the otherwise homogeneous region is that transport costs to the same market differ substantially within the region (most remote households have to walk 8 hours to reach the market). Using this quasi-experimental setting, we compare the economic behavior of households by remoteness, allowing us to estimate the benefits of having access to feeder roads for rural households. We find that the benefits of reducing transportation costs by 50 US Dollars per metric ton for the most remote households would result in benefits worth roughly 35 percent of household consumption and that a hypothetical gravel road built halfway through the survey site that lasts 10 years will have an internal ra...
This paper examines the mechanisms that transmit isolation into poverty in Madagascar using household survey data combined with a census of administrative communes. Given the importance of agriculture to the rural poor, where nine out of... more
This paper examines the mechanisms that transmit isolation into poverty in Madagascar using household survey data combined with a census of administrative communes. Given the importance of agriculture to the rural poor, where nine out of ten poor persons is engaged in farming, we concentrate on isolation manifesting itself in the form of high transaction costs such as the cost of transporting agricultural commodities to major market centers. We find that (a) the incidence of poverty in rural Madagascar increases with remoteness; (b) yields of major staple crops fall considerably as one gets farther away from major markets; (c) and the use of agricultural inputs declines with isolation. Simulation results using output from rice production function estimates suggest that halving travel time per kilometer on major highways (feeder roads) will increase primary season rice production by 1.3 (1.0) percent.
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Since the beginning of the 2000s, important changes have occurred in Ethiopia’s economy.1 In this chapter, the extent to which these changes have affected teff markets are assessed using primary data collected from wholesale markets and... more
Since the beginning of the 2000s, important changes have occurred in Ethiopia’s economy.1 In this chapter, the extent to which these changes have affected teff markets are assessed using primary data collected from wholesale markets and secondary data on teff prices and margins, obtained from Ethiopia’s Central Statistical Agency (CSA) and the Ethiopian Grain Trade Enterprise (EGTE). Five possible reasons are considered for teff market transformation and for the changes in teff price margins over the period 2001–2011.2 This study period has been influenced by changes in five factors that may have affected how teff markets function. First, fast economic and income growth is changing food demand. Second, urbanization is leading to larger rural–urban food and teff marketing flows. Third, investments in road infrastructure and a better organized transport sector have led to significant declines in real transportation costs. Fourth, the widespread availability of mobile phones has improv...
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Abstract Understanding the complex relationship between water, agriculture and poverty (WAP) is essential for informed policy-making in light of increasing demand for scarce water resources and greater climatic variability. Yet, our... more
Abstract Understanding the complex relationship between water, agriculture and poverty (WAP) is essential for informed policy-making in light of increasing demand for scarce water resources and greater climatic variability. Yet, our understanding of the WAP nexus remains surprisingly undeveloped and dispersed across multiple disciplines due to conceptual (biophysical and economic) and measurement issues. We argue that water for agriculture will need to be better managed for it to contribute to reductions in poverty and vulnerabilities. Moreover, this management will need to consider not just quantities of water, but the quality of the water and the multiple agricultural and non-agricultural uses. For this reason, expanding research in WAP needs to involve interdisciplinary efforts. We identify three key knowledge gaps in WAP that are particularly pressing in light of greater climatic variability. These are climate change adaptation, over-abstraction of groundwater, and water quality.
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Abstract We estimate households’ willingness-to-pay for rural feeder roads in Ethiopia. Using purposefully collected data, we compare the economic behaviour of households by remoteness to estimate the benefits of access to feeder roads.... more
Abstract We estimate households’ willingness-to-pay for rural feeder roads in Ethiopia. Using purposefully collected data, we compare the economic behaviour of households by remoteness to estimate the benefits of access to feeder roads. Although we cannot definitively assert a causal relationship, we cautiously estimate that gravel roads have internal rates of return of 12–35 per cent. These results suggest that rural feeder roads may have relatively high rates of return even in unfavourable settings where (a) small-scale farmers have low levels of marketed agricultural surplus, (b) non-farm earning opportunities are negligible, and (c) motorised transport services are not guaranteed.
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We applaud the intent and innovations of C. Kremen et al.(“Aligning Conservation Priorities Across Taxa in Madagascar with High-Resolution Planning Tools”, 11 April, p. 222-6), but are deeply concerned by their omission of human... more
We applaud the intent and innovations of C. Kremen et al.(“Aligning Conservation Priorities Across Taxa in Madagascar with High-Resolution Planning Tools”, 11 April, p. 222-6), but are deeply concerned by their omission of human considerations in determining" conservation priorities" for Madagascar. One mere sub-clause (" delineation of protected areas requires taking socioeconomic factors into account," p. 224) acknowledges that people matter to the location and consequences of biodiversity conservation. Yet just as “ ...
Research Interests: Immigration, Economic Growth, Migration, Fertility, Developing Countries, and 20 moreEconomic Development, Vulnerability, Policy Analysis, Immigrants, Emigration, Primary Education, Population Size, Immigration Laws, Rural Areas, Immigrant, Liquidity, Global Development, Tertiary Education, Immigration Policy, Dissemination, Purchasing Power Parity, Low Income Countries, Immigration Policies, Balance of Payments, and Incomes
Research Interests: Labor Economics, Rural, Accounting, Transaction Costs, Capital Markets, and 20 moreHousing, Financial Markets, Safety, Mobility, Savings, Primary Education, Inequality, Insurance, Agricultural Productivity, Externalities, Agricultural Production, Interest Rates, Rural Areas, Land Ownership, Entry Barriers, Risk Reduction, Description, Allocative Efficiency, Service Sector, and Market Failures
The purpose of this note is to illustrate how a generic multi-market model can be adapted to the circum stances of a particular developing country to assess the impact of alternative agricultural policies on the well-being of households.... more
The purpose of this note is to illustrate how a generic multi-market model can be adapted to the circum stances of a particular developing country to assess the impact of alternative agricultural policies on the well-being of households. We describe the main features and results of a multi-market model for Madagascar that focuses on income generating activities in an agricultural sector that is characterized by seasonal variability. We find evidence that investments in rural infrastructure and commercial food storage have both direct and indirect benefits on poor households.
Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track... more
Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track consumption correlates as opposed to consumption itself have been developed to overcome such data gaps. These methods typically assume that the estimated relation between consumption and its predictors is
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Research Interests: Development Economics, International Development, Rural, Economic Growth, Human Development, and 22 moreQuality of life, Housing, Vietnam, Rural Poverty, Financial Markets, Applied Economics, Estimation Techniques, Regional economic development, Inequality, Inflation, Income, Small Area Estimation, Rural Areas, Prediction Model, Stocks, Consumer Durables, Absolute Value, Poverty Dynamics, Living Standards, Devaluation, Income Elasticity, and Point Estimates
This paper finds that in the period under observation (1999-2005), a fall in GDP per capita was accompanied by a substantial decrease in productivity per worker, the effects of which were only partly off-set by the increase in both... more
This paper finds that in the period under observation (1999-2005), a fall in GDP per capita was accompanied by a substantial decrease in productivity per worker, the effects of which were only partly off-set by the increase in both (adult) employment and the increase of the working age population. The fall in output per worker is particularly associated with the
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Stifel and Alderman evaluate the Vaso de Leche (VL) feeding program in Peru. They pose the question that if a community-based multistage targeting scheme such as that of the VL program is progressive, is it possible that the program can... more
Stifel and Alderman evaluate the Vaso de Leche (VL) feeding program in Peru. They pose the question that if a community-based multistage targeting scheme such as that of the VL program is progressive, is it possible that the program can achieve its nutritional objectives? The authors address this by linking VL public expenditure data with household survey data to assess
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In this paper we examine the relative importance of rural versus urban areas in terms of monetary poverty and seven other related living standards indicators. We present the levels of urban-rural differences for several African countries... more
In this paper we examine the relative importance of rural versus urban areas in terms of monetary poverty and seven other related living standards indicators. We present the levels of urban-rural differences for several African countries for which we have data and find that living standards in rural areas lag far behind those in urban areas. Then we examine the
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We build a CGE model of an archetype African economy to simulate the welfare effects of trade liberalization specifically on poverty. The economy is modeled following a dual-dual framework (Thorbecke, 1993, 1994, 1997) that is... more
We build a CGE model of an archetype African economy to simulate the welfare effects of trade liberalization specifically on poverty. The economy is modeled following a dual-dual framework (Thorbecke, 1993, 1994, 1997) that is characteristic of the structure of a developing country in its middle development phase. This provides the basis for analyzing the distribution of modern and informal
Research Interests: Econometrics, Poverty, Migration, Income Distribution, Applied Economics, and 13 morePolicy modeling, Poverty Measurement, Developing Country, Trade Liberalization, Informal Sector, Model Calibration, Public Administration and Policy, Trade Reform, CGE, Distribution of Income, Social accounting matrix, Dual, and Urban Area
Page 1. PRELIMINARY: PLEASE DO NOT CITE Gray Matter with a Side of Fries: The Cognitive and Behavioral Effects of Childhood Malnutrition in the United States Susan L. Averett and David C. Stifel Department of Economics and Business... more
Page 1. PRELIMINARY: PLEASE DO NOT CITE Gray Matter with a Side of Fries: The Cognitive and Behavioral Effects of Childhood Malnutrition in the United States Susan L. Averett and David C. Stifel Department of Economics and Business Lafayette College ...