NOTE: THIS PAGE IS VERY, VERY OUT OF DATE. PLEASE SEE MY RESEARCH OVERVIEW PAGE FOR A LISTING OF CURRENT PROJECTS IN MY GROUP.

General Introduction

There are three basic, interrelated thrusts to my research program.

These interests cross the boundaries between development economics, agricultural economics, environmental and natural resource economics, and international economics, and naturally draw me into related subjects in core economic theory and methods.

Read on for a fairly detailed description of my past and current research, and click "Working Papers" for recent, unpublished research papers. For a brief overview of my research and information on current research projects, please visit my Research Overview page.

Email me at cbb2@cornell.edu for copies of any papers below that you cannot download or for copies of any papers on my curriculum vita that are not available below due to publisher's copyright.

Description of Research Program

Poverty, hunger, economic policy and the structural transformation of low-income societies.

In this world of plenty, almost half the world's six billion people live on two dollars a day or less. Between one third and one half suffer undernutrition due to insufficient intake of calories, protein or critical micronutrients such as vitamin A, iodine and iron. More than one child in five lives in acute poverty, a disturbing fact to this father of five. At one level or another, virtually all of my research and teaching tries to explore why such unnecessary injustice continues to disfigure a rich, technologically advanced world and what individuals and institutions can do to improve matters.

This core thread of my research follows directly from my undergraduate and graduate training, which emphasized the difficult social transitions involved in economic development, and from my predoctoral experience in Washington working on Third World debt, macroeconomic stabilization and structural adjustment programs. The disappointing results of economic reforms in Madagascar were the subject of my dissertation, , which won the Outstanding Dissertation Award for 1994 from the American Agricultural Economics Association. A number of papers derived from that work have appeared in various journals and books, exploring issues such as the effect of exchange rate devaluation on stochastic food price distributions, agricultural productivity and farmer incentives to increase output, intensify production, or engage in deforestation, the microeconomics of the political economy of food price policy, and how one might reconcile the simultaneous observation of increased food insecurity and economic growth in poor areas. [See my curriculum vita if you want bibliographic details.] These issues continue to draw a fair share of my attention, as the design and effect of market-oriented economic reform and Third World debt forgiveness remain highly topical, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

Since markets are now nearly universally regarded as indispensable to economic development, I have been working at understanding how markets actually function in poor countries and how analysts might reliably evaluate whether markets function efficiently or not. This has involved primary survey work among traders in Madagascar, exploring how market liberalization changed the structure and behavior of the food marketing channel. Almost a decade later, Marcel Fafchamps, Bart Minten and I are just starting up new work in Madagascar on trader behavior. I have been doing related work on livestock markets in Kenya and one of my students plans a dissertation on this topic. I complement this applied work with fundamental work on methods. The more I probed the literature on agricultural markets, the more dissatisfied I became with existing statistical techniques for markets analysis. So one sub-vein of my work on markets has focused on developing improved empirical methods for establishing whether markets are in competitive equilibrium. Due to data availability, most of this work has been applied to international trade, particularly work with one of my former Ph.D. students, Jau Rong Li, on trans-Pacific trade in the pork industry. But the core principles apply in developing country contexts as well, although data insufficiency has to date precluded their application in these settings.

Related issues of how poor countries and communities integrate into a globalizing world have drawn some of my attention as well. This has involved conceptual work on globalization, and a series of special issues of journals co-edited with Tom Reardon and others (Environment and Development Economics, Food Policy, and International Food and Agribusiness Marketing Review) on agroindustrialization, globalization and international development, as well as more theoretical work with Yi Nung Yang and Dawn Thilmany on international product standards and regulatory barriers to trade.

Since most of the world's poor live in rural areas and depend directly or indirectly on agriculture, another branch of this research activity looks at peasant agricultural productivity, the technologies available to low-income smallholders, and how and why rural African households diversify their livelihoods across farm and non-farm pursuits. This line of research has involved core methodological work on the estimation of frontier production functions, particularly exploring the role of agroecological conditions and macroeconomic disruptions on farmer technical efficiency in the rice systems of C�te d'Ivoire. That work is joint with Shane Sherlund, one of my former MS students, and Akin Adesina. Our work has also probed methodological questions of how best to estimate labor supply in smallholder agriculture. More recently, a couple of graduate students I work with have been researching the effects of land quality of rice productivity in Madagascar and why farmers there either fail to adopt or disadopt a promising low external input method of rice cultivation that has been shown to double or triple yields. Work with Garth Holloway and Simeon Ehui has focused on Ethiopian farmers' use of improved cow breeds and their participation in commercial milk markets. Several different colleagues have collaborated with me recently on papers related to income and livelihoods diversification. Tom Reardon, Patrick Webb and I are guest editing a special issue of Food Policy on this topic, due out in the second half of 2001.

Another strand of this research on poverty focuses on food security. This has involved both specific, empirical work on iodine deficiency in Morocco with colleagues at Utah State University and IAV Hassan II in Morocco, study of the time series properties of food prices, a broad review piece for the Handbook of Agricultural Economics (due out from Elsevier in 2001), and a series of papers on food aid. Some of the food aid papers use country-level data on the United States' PL480 food aid programs to explore food aid's effects on recipient country producer incentives, food availability, and commercial trade patterns. More recent work has been at household level, looking at questions of targeting efficacy and induced effects on recipient behaviors.

Perhaps due to my undergraduate training in history or maybe because of my strong Christian faith, I have always struggled to reconcile neoclassical economics textbook treatments of human nature as materially driven and purely consequentialist with a belief that we humans are moral and social creatures. So I have dabbled a bit in this topic as it relates to questions of poverty alleviation, the principle of subsidiarity, interpersonal trust, and social behavioral norms. I have published a couple of papers in this area. But far more interesting is the new team project on "moral and social dimensions of microeconomic behavior in low-income communities" in which I am engaged with eleven distinguished colleagues. This is a very exciting project.

Individual and Market Behavior Under Risk and Uncertainty

One of my principal concerns in low-income societies is the distribution of exposure to and the response to risks that often precipitate individual or community-level crises. The mere existence of risk may trap risk averse or liquidity-constrained persons in poverty. Issues of risk exposure and management have tended not to receive sufficient attention in high level discussions about poverty alleviation and economic development strategies, and this thread of my work is meant explicitly to address that deficiency. Most of my work in this area is in east Africa, in Kenya, Ethiopia and Madagascar. I have previously done work on risk and rice farmers in Madagascar. But most of my work in this area now focuses on pastoralists in the dryland regions of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya. A terrific interdisciplinary team has been working in this region for several years now and we have begun generating interesting results (e.g., with respect to the existence of stochastic poverty traps, the distributional effects of animal disease quarantines, the advisability of livestock restocking and destocking efforts, etc.) and field research methods (e.g., participatory risk mapping). Work is underway now on state-contingent resource access, complex property rights, climate forecast information, crop-livestock integration, behavioral response to drought, and pastoralist marketing decisions, among other topics.

An interest in risk and Wisconsin training as an applied econometrician has led me into econometric modeling of time-varying conditional moments and risk premia. Some of this work has been applied to food price series in Madagascar. More recent work with Kai Li Wang has focused on more advanced applications to daily exchange rates data. As with my work on market analysis methods, the particular empirical application bears little relation to poverty questions, but the methods are appropriate and should prove useful once suitable data become available.

Poverty, Food Security and Environmental Stress in Developing Areas.

My interests in poor agrarian communities, and especially fieldwork in east and southern Africa led naturally to an interest in the nexus between poverty and environmental degradation. This thread of my research program is closely tied to the others. My principal concerns in this area have to do with the environmental stress caused by the structural transformation of low-income agrarian economies and by individual and community exposure to risk and adverse shocks, and with broader normative questions about the nature of "sustainable development". The common thread of the various veins of this work is that the plight of the rural poor and threats to natural resources in the tropics are intimately related and both topics must be addressed directly if significant progress is to be made in either.

One part of this work explores recent fashions in tropical biodiversity conservation. Peter Arcese, a zoologist, and I wrote a couple of papers together on the problems of 1990s designs for integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs). One of my current Ph.D. students, Heidi Gjertsen, and I are working on related questions of how the optimal design of tropical biodiversity conservation efforts varies with observable parameters describing local biophysical and socioeconomic conditions. Travis Lybbert, one of my former MS students, and I have done some recent work on bioprospecting and its likely and observed effects on rural welfare and tropical resource conservation.

My work on the environmental effects of economic reforms, including several papers with Tom Reardon, links directly back to the first thrust of my research program. My Cornell colleague David Lee and I edited a book out from CABI in late 2000 on agricultural intensification, poverty alleviation, and the environment. This explores the rather complex interrelationships between agricultural development strategies and the natural resource base on which agriculture depends. Frank Place (ICRAF), Abdillahi Aboud (Egerton University, Kenya) and I are just finishing up editing another book for CABI on natural resource management in African agriculture. [Book details are on my main web site.]

I have also been studying more philosophical and theological questions of environmental ethics and economic development. principally in collaboration with Ray Grizzle, a marine biologist at the University of New Hampshire, and a survey piece with John Bergstrom of the University of Georgia.

General interest.

As one who places considerable stock in academe and the value of applied research, I also dabble a bit in more general issues. Three deserve some comment. The first is a book co-authored with Jeff Cason, a political scientist at Middlebury College, is Overseas Research: A Practical Guide (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). This is a distillation of lessons learned from several dozen field-experienced social science researchers. The basic objective of the book is to spare new researchers, especially graduate students, some of the embarrassments and frustrations of reinventing the flat tire in international fieldwork. Second, in the process of reconsidering the library's serials holdings in economics, two former colleagues and I wrote up our findings in a brief paper that presents the first available subdiscipline-specific journals rankings in economics. That paper appeared in Applied Economics and includes some rather shocking estimates of the implicit weights accorded applied economics fields in the journals rankings schemes traditionally employed in economics. Finally, DeeVon Bailey and I took advantage of an administrative project he was handling to study faculty salary determination in the academic labor market. Our findings, that faculty salaries are determined in a reasonably competitive academic labor market that rewards productivity, although intuitive, contradict some of the existing literature, which claims academic labor markets are monopsonistic.

Conclusion.

As you can clearly gather, my research program is broad, reflecting the complex and multifactorial causation of the most compelling challenges contemporary society faces in caring for all humankind and the environment in which we live. I find it a wonderfully stimulating and educational adventure. Thank you for taking time to explore where I have been and where I am going in this fascinating and somewhat unpredictable adventure. I welcome your comments and suggestions (including work by you or others that I should read).