entry propensity the supply of entrants and the spatial distribution of business units beesley m e and hamilton r t 1994 entry propensity the supply of entrants and the spatial distribution of business units reg studies 28 233 239 an extensive new database is used in the estimation of models explaining entry propensities across the cross section of british manufacturing industries few previous studies of industrial entry have adequately incorporated the supply of prospective entrants this is redressed here by allowing for the possibility that prospective business founders are industry specific with their numbers varying among industries the spatial distribution of business units within an industry is also shown to have an important bearing on entry an effect which also appears to have been overlooked in previous studies beesley m e et hamilton r t 1994 la propension a se faire immatriculer le nombre d immatriculations et la distribution spatiale des unites industrielles reg studies 28 233 239 on se sert d une nouvelle base de donnees plus etendue pour estimer des

semi autonomous revenue authorities in sub saharan africa silver bullet or white elephant a major component of tax administration reform in sub saharan africa for the last 30 years has been the creation of semi autonomous revenue authorities saras the effects of their creation on rev

entry in greek manufacturing industry athens vs the rest of greece the paper reports an attempt to estimate the determinants of entry in greek manufacturing industry in the 1984 87 period and to identify the differences between locatio nal entry preferences entry in athens is found to be hesitant with respect to factors such as profitability and increased competition conversely entry in the rest of the country is strongly related to expected profits and safe markets negatively affected by relative labour costs and indifferent to international competition threats the healthier approach of regional entry is enhancing regional development prospects and partly justifies the strict regional policies of the 1980s

credit market constraints consumption smoothing and the accumulation of durable production assets in low income countries investments in bullocks in india in this paper we formulate and estimate a finite horizon structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low income agricultural environments income uncertainty constraints on borrowing and rental markets and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption the model is fit to longitudinal indian household data on farm profits bullock stocks and pump sets the estimated structural parameters are used to assess the effects on the life cycle accumulation of bullocks agricultural profits and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance

new firm startups technology and macroeconomic fluctuations new firm startup activity is examined within a framework pooling a cross section of 117 industries over six time periods between 1976 and 1986 a model is introduced relating startup activity both to elements of the business cycle in particular the macroeconomic growth rate the cost of capital and the unemployment rate and to industry specific characteristics especially the technological conditions underlying the industry the pooled cross section regression results suggest that macroeconomic fluctuations as well as industry specific elements contribute to startup activity while new firm startups respond positively to macroeconomic growth they are promoted by a low cost of capital and high unemployment rate a somewhat surprising result is that new firm startups are not apparently deterred in capital intensive industries and where r d expenditures play an important role the empirical results suggest that new firms may be able to overcome their inherent size and experience disadvantages in such markets through exploiting university research and pursuing innovative activity

foreign direct investment competition and industrial development in the host country this paper analyses the impact of foreign direct investment fdi on the development of local firms we focus on two likely effects of fdi a competition effect which deters entry of domestic firms and positive market externalities which foster the development of local industry using a simple theoretical model to illustrate how these forces work we show that the number of domestic firms follows a u shaped curve where the competition effect first dominates but is gradually outweighed by positive externalities evidence for ireland tends to support this result specifically applying semi parametric regression techniques on plant level panel data for the manufacturing sector we find that while the competition effect may have initially deterred local firms entry this initial effect has been outpaced by positive externalities making the overall impact of fdi largely positive for the domestic industry

the political economy of stabilization commitment capacity and public response abstract political pressures are generally recognized as important in determining success or failure of economic stabilization and adjustment programs but there has been little comparative analysis of the politics of stabilization this study examines the factors affecting i political leaders commitment to stabilization measures often called political will ii governmental ability to implement stabilization measures and iii the responses of key interest groups and the public at large to those measures the study also discusses political implications of the design of programs and the attempted speed of stabilization and sketches the tactics available to governments to manage political risk including partial compensation persuasion diversion or obfuscation and containment of protest the discussion is based on case studies of stabilization efforts in five fairly poor small highly trade dependent countries ghana in the late 1960s and early 1970s and zambia kenya sri lanka and jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s a subsidiary theme within the broader discussion is the ways in which the political economy of stabilization may differ in such countries as compared to larger semi industrialized economies

entrepreneurial strategy and the presence of small firms a model is presented hypothesizing that the level of small firm presence in any given industry emanates from the exogenous stock of entrepreneurial talent a stochastic element of managerial and entrepreneurial talent entry deterrence and the entrepreneurial strategy deployed by small firms using data newly released by the u s small business administration the hypothesis is tested for a sample of 247 four digit standard industrial classification industries spanning the entire spectrum of firm sizes we find that consistently for all the measures of small firm size and for all of the time periods used the existence of entry deterrence and reliance upon innovative strategy explains a significant proportion of the variation in the presence of small firms

long term impacts of global food crisis on production decisions evidence from farm investments in indonesia did the rise in food prices have a long term impact on agricultural production using household level panel data from seven provinces of indonesia this paper finds that the price shock created a forward looking incentive to invest which can dynamically enhance productivity in agriculture it also finds that the impact of the price shock on investment behavior differs by initial wealth in response to price increases wealthy farmers invested more in productive assets while poor farmers increased their financial savings as well as consumption price spikes relax liquidity constraints which increases investments among the richer while do so savings and consumptions among the poor possibly leading to diverging income inequality in the long run

the changing geography of producer services employment in britain gillespie a e and green a e 1987 the changing geography of producer services employment in britain reg studies 21 397 411 this paper examines the changing geography of producer services employment in britain between 1971 and 1981 using data from the census of employment the study begins with a review of alternative views on the service sector and its relationship to economic growth and the place of producer services within the division of labour is described it is shown that there is a pronounced urban and regional differentiation in producer services employment factors operating to increase the concentration of such employment are indentified as are counteracting tendencies favouring deconcentration individual producer services industries are shown to display different locational logic and varying trends of concentration and deconcentration during 1971 81 overall the maintenance of the spatial concentration of producer services employment in southern britain coupled with relative decon

what factors inspire the high entry flow in taiwan s manufacturing industries a count entry model approach why is the entry flow of the manufacturing sector extremely high in taiwan and does it contribute to the prevailing entrepreneurship this article aims to explore what factors inspire potential entrants to go into an industry based on a theoretical formulation of the poisson probability entry model a count data model is employed to investigate the determinants of entry flows the empirical results reveal that traditional entry barriers indeed lower the entry flow the entry incentives including price cost margin and industry growth play a lesser role at attracting new firms while alternatively the market size acts as a better proxy of an entry incentive in explaining entry flows incumbents responses to entry r d and advertising intensity are found to be associated with a significant negative impact on entry flows this article also finds that there is a higher bound of covariate of entry about 10 that can be attributed to the immeasurable personality of entrepreneurs entrepreneurship rather b

creative destruction among industrial firms in the united states there is a growing interest in dynamic modeling of capitalism as recent experience has demonstrated the importance of innovation in shaping the structure and growth rate of capitalist nations economists recognize that innovation by its nature describes a dynamic evolutionary model of capitalism which is inadequately described by the equilibrium models which have dominated economic thought since the 19th century

capital constraints and the performance of entrepreneurial firms in vietnam entrepreneurship has been among the key driving forces of the emergence of a dynamic private sector during the recent decades in vietnam this article addresses for vietnam the questions how capital constraints affect the performance of family firms and how entrepreneurs human and social capital interact with capital constraints to leverage entrepreneurial income a panel of 1721 firms in 4 years is used results are consistent with the resource dependency approach indicating an adverse effect of capital constraints on firm performance firms suffering capital constraints perform substantially better suggesting that they need more capital simply to finance newly recognized profit opportunities human capital plays a vital role in relaxing capital constraints and improves the entrepreneurial performance whereas the effect of social capital stemming from strong ties and weak ties is limited strong ties bring emotional support and weak ties give nonfinancial benefits from regular and useful business contacts advanced econometric analysis tools to take into account the endogeneity of capital constraints are used to establish relationships among relevant variables

the enduring impact of the american dust bowl short and long run adjustments to environmental catastrophe the 1930 s american dust bowl was an environmental catastrophe that greatly eroded sections of the plains analyzing new data collected to identify low medium and high erosion counties the dust bowl is estimated to have immediately substantially and persistently reduced agricultural land values and revenues during the depression and through at least the 1950 s there was limited reallocation of farmland from activities that became relatively less productive agricultural adjustments such as reallocating land from crops to livestock recovered only 14 to 28 of the initial agricultural cost the economy adjusted predominately through migration rather than through capital inows and increased industry

wage and competition channels of foreign direct investment and new firm entry using a rich data set of the dutch manufacturing sector between 1995 and 2010 we investigate the effect of foreign direct investment fdi on domestic new firm entry the emerging empirical literature has focused on the direct relationship between fdi and entry but has not explored the mechanisms behind the observed effect drawing on a simultaneous equations model our analysis features both the direct effect of fdi as well as indirect effects through two channels industry competition and wages we estimate the parameters through 3sls and take into account the endogeneity of competition and wages with respect to entry our results show that there is a significant negative direct effect of fdi on entry at the same time fdi decreases competition and increases wage levels which then impact entry positively and negatively respectively the total effect of fdi is negative but small and virtually disappears after one year policy implications are discussed

the distributional impacts of indonesia s financial crisis on household welfare a rapid response methodology analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is an ever more pressing need if policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely affected they need to identify those who have been hurt most and estimate the magnitude of the harm they have suffered they must also respond in a timely manner this article develops a simple methodology for measuring these effects and applies it to analyze the impact of the indonesian economic crisis on household welfare using only pre crisis household information it estimates the compensating variation for indonesian households following the 1997 asian currency crisis and then explores the results with flexible nonparametric methods it finds that virtually every household was severely affected although the urban poor fared the worst the ability of poor rural households to produce food mitigated the worst consequences of the high inflation the distributional consequences are the same whether or not households are permitted to substitute toward relatively cheaper goods households with young children may have suffered disproportionately large adverse effects

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

industrial restructuring and economic growth the last two decades have been a period of structural change in industrialised countries the extent of this restructuring process has been different across countries and industries though in this paper we investigate the effect of lagging behind in the process of downsizing and deconcentration we find empirical evidence of industries that experienced only little downsizing when compared internationally to experience less subsequent growth on average however this effect is industry dependent and its magnitude depends upon whether firm or establishment data are used technologically advanced industries are found to be particularly sensitive to lack of restructuring

why is labour managed firm entry so rare an analysis of uk manufacturing data abstract why are there so few labour managed entrants in market economies we address this question by analysing a panel of labour managed entrants into uk manufacturing industries using poisson and negative binomial random effects models our main finding is a significant negative relationship between entry counts and both the capital labour ratio and the variance of profits this is consistent with long standing theoretical arguments that labour managed firms face problems in raising capital and spreading risk

political liberation and economic policy reform in africa abstract this paper assesses the impact of political liberalization on economic reform in sub saharan africa it argues that the emergence of more participatory politics will not necessarily make successful reform less likely although the instability of political change will exact an economic cost in the short run in the long run political liberalization provides opportunities as well as risks for economic reform it probably makes some macroeconomic reforms more difficult but it provides a window of opportunity for significant progress on governance issues the net impact will vary across states in most countries the prospects for economic reform will not be dramatically altered because political reform does not alter some of the structural characteristics of economic policy making in africa

food price changes and household welfare what do we learn from two different approaches the use of a marginal approach can significantly distort the predicted effects of large price variations on monetary welfare over the medium to longer term this paper aims at shedding some light

economic stabilization conditionality and political stability imf conditionality is seldom so important that it dominates all other considerations for political stability imf stabilization programs often shift benefits from one group to another they expose elites to charges of selling the sovereignty of their countries the imposition of imf conditions particularly subsidy cuts may lead to sharp outbreaks of civil disorder nonetheless the imf provides resources that make adjustment easier and thus may lessen the chances of political instability for a country imf programs are seldom implemented fully as negotiated and the penalties for partial compliance are not great debtor countries have more flexibility in imposing austerity measures and the economic constraints are less binding than often assumed the very availability of alternatives to imf programs results in internal divisions because some favor debt repudiation and others oppose it groups now contend over solutions to the debt problems of their countries

using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in thailand this paper measures the extent to which farmers are able to use savings and dissavings to smooth consumption in response to unexpected shocks to income time series information on regional rainfall is used to construct estimates of transitory income due to rainfall shocks the relationship between these measures of transitory income and savings indicates that farm households save a significantly higher fraction of transitory income than nontransitory income jel d91 016 the incomes of farm households in developing countries are notorious for being both low and uncertain policies that increase the incomes of farmers may well be different

precautionary saving credit constraints and irreversible investment theory and evidence from serniarid india this article investigates the extent to which poor households are discouraged from making a non divisible but profitable investment using data on irrigation wells in india we estimate the parameters of a structural model of irreversible investment results show that poor farmers fail to undertake a profitable investment that they could in principle self finance because the nondivisibility of the investment puts it out of their reach irreversibility constitutes an additional disincentive to invest simulations show that the availability of credit can dramatically increase investment in irrigation and that interest rate subsidization has little impact

determinants of firm start up size an application of quantile regression for ireland in this paper we provide empirical evidence on the determinants of firm start up size using data for the manufacturing sector in ireland and compare our results with recent findings for portuguese manufacturing industries mata and machado 1996 to allow for firm heterogeneity between firm entrants we use quantile regression techniques for our empirical estimation we find that the determinants of start up size differ in their importance for small and large scale entrants in particular industry size and industry growth seem to affect large scale entrants only

small firm entry in us manufacturing a cross section empirical analysis examining the entry behavior of small firms is provided in this paper while the authors find that certain traditional market structure characteristics and entry barriers have a strong impact on small firm entry behavior the reliance upon innovative strategy by small firms also explains a significant amount of the variation in the pattern of entry by small firms they conclude that small firm entry is at least partially determined by entry barriers industry specific characteristics facilitating retaliatory conduct by incumbent firms and the reliance upon innovative strategy by small firms copyright 1989 by the london school of economics and political science

risk financial markets and human capital in a developing country this paper explores the link between financial market incompleteness and human capital accumulation we examine how child school attendance responds to seasonal fluctuations in the income of agrarian households using panel data from rural india to pinpoint market imperfections we study responses to aggregate and idiosyncratic as well as to anticipated and unanticipated income shocks our main finding is that seasonal fluctuations in school attendance are a form of self insurance but one which does not result in a substantial loss of human capital on average

rising real wages mechanization and growing advantage of large farms evidence from indonesia this paper examines dynamic patterns of land use capital investments and wages in agriculture using farm panel data from indonesia the empirical analysis shows that with an increase in real wages that prevailed in both agricultural and non agricultural sectors in rural areas relatively larger farmers increased the size of operational farm land by renting in land as well as used more hired in machines through machine rental and or service providers which induces the substitution of labor by machines machines and land are complementary and consistently the inverse farm size productivity relationship tends to be reversed among relatively large holders the results support growing diminishing advantage of large small farms in the presence of rapidly rising real wages and have food security policy implications to many asian countries where real wages are rapidly rising and small farms are predominant

market structure and innovation a survey economics we all recite deals with allocation of limited resources towards satisfaction of unlimited wants resources are typically identified as land labor and capital plus a technology that determines their transformation into consumer goods disparity between the available goods and services and the desired gives rise to scarcity and the question of what how and for whom to produce the focus then shifts to description and evaluation of alternative resource allocation mechanisms for making the choices the pareto criterion by which an allocation of resources is deemed efficient if any reallocation improving the position of some individual worsens the position of others is a commonly employed gauge of a mechanism s performance in the absence of externalities increasing returns to scale and uncertainty a perfectly competitive market system yields a pareto optimal allocation of resources this underlies the view that individual self interest is compatible with society s interest the further conclusion that pareto optimality may not be achieved via the market system in the presence of monopoly elements provides an economic rationale for antitrust laws the objective of a resource allocation mechanism appears to be according to the analysis described above to make the best of available resources the alternative objective of relaxing constraints through expanding the resource base or developing new technology seems to be beyond its scope thus until rather recently technical advance had been regarded in the mainstream of economic theory as unmotivated by the quest for profits and substantially unaffected by resource allocation instead as j schmookler observed technology had been viewed as a parameter like the weather affecting the outcome of resource allocations but itself unaffected by them 84 1965 evidence that technological progress has significantly contributed to growth in productivity together with a substantial increase in research and development activity largely financed by government and carried out by industry see f machlup 51 1962 may have spurred reconsideration of this view once technical advance is regarded as an economic variable it is natural to in

the politics of trade liberalization in africa have urged a wide range of policy reforms on african countries including correcting overvalued exchange rates reforming the public sector and trade liberalization in this article i explore the prospect that external trade liberalization reforms will be undertaken and sustained in africa many african countries have undertaken stabilization policies including devaluation of their currencies some have embarked on fundamental public sector reform programs few have liberalized their trade extensively this suggests after the fact that the political constraints may be greater for changing trade policies than for devaluing currencies or for restricting credit however while analyses have been undertaken that examine the politics of stabilization and the components of adjustment programs such as lowering consumer subsidies and some work is in process on privatization and public sector reform relatively little has been done on the politics of trade liberalization in africa by trade liberalization i mean the relaxation or elimination of tariffs and removal of duties and or quotas on exports alteration in nontariff barriers such as import quotas and quantitative restrictions changes in licensing and direct allocation of foreign exchange and in specific regulations for products and removal or relaxation of export subsidies 2 many african countries have used tariff and nontariff barriers to further import substitution strategies kenya for example in the 1970s placed increasing reliance on import controls and quantitative restrictions to save foreign exchange and to encourage domestic manufacturing production in the 1980s ghana and nigeria were at the high end of the scale of countries in terms of the number of goods covered by quantitative restrictions 3 the sudan has made extensive use of quotas

multistage selection and the financing of new ventures using a random sample of 221 new swedish ventures initiated in 1998 we examine why some new ventures are more likely than others to successfully be awarded capital from external sources we examine venture financing as a staged selection process in which two sequential selection events systematically winnow the population of ventures and influence which ventures receive financing for a venture to receive external financing its founders must first select it as a candidate for external funding and then a financier must fund it we find evidence that founders select ventures as candidates for external finance based on their perceptions of market competition market growth and employment growth while financiers base funding decisions on objective verifiable indicators of venture development such as the completion of organizing activities marketing activities and the level of sales of the venture our findings have implications for venture financing and evolutionary theories of social processes

sectoral differences in plant start up size in the finnish economy new knowledge on the factors behind the choice of plant entry scale is important for understanding the entry process and the recruitment decisions of new plants in different sectors of the economy the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of various industry attributes on plant start up size measured with employment using data on the entire finnish business sector the paper extends previous research by examining the differences between manufacturing and services and by using a richer set of explanatory variables the relative importance of the covariates for different sized entrants is taken into account by using a quantile regression approach the results for manufacturing and services are remarkably similar however the findings imply that in the future analysis it is also important to consider the effect of the regional availability of educated and experienced work force on plant start up size in these two sectors the findings on the importance of scale economies and industry turbulence in determining start up size correspond to the earlier studies the results also show that single plant and multiplant entrants face a rather different entry environment in addition the employment share of foreign owned entrants in the industry has to be taken into account

saving in developing countries theory and review in the literature on economic development much of the interest in saving has been focused on the relation between saving and growth but saving is not only about accumulation it is about smoothing consumption in the face of volatile and unpredictable income and helping to ensure the living standards of poor people whose lives are difficult and uncertain this paper develops a model of households which cannot borrow but which accumulate assets as a buffer stock to protect consumption when incomes are low such households dissave as often as they save do not accumulate assets over the long term and have on average very small asset holdings but their consumption is markedly smoother than their income much of the evidence is as consistent with this view of saving as it is incosistent with standard views of smoothing over the life cycle and with explanations of the link between saving and growth in terms of life cycle saving behavior consumption smoothing is also a useful way of thinking about government policy where volatility in the world prices of taxed commodities can generate sharp fluctuations in government revenues as well as reallocations of revenue between the private and public sectors many important policy issues in developing countries hinge on issues of consumption and smoothing and research on these issues is currently likely to be more productive than work on the relation between saving and growth

the determinants of firm start up and entry in italian producer services in this paper the determinants of new firm formation in the producer services are studied by using national security data on firms with at least one employee two ratios are computed and analysed for the 95 italian provinces an index of fertility represented by the share of new enterprises on employees and a birth rate represented for each province by the ratio between new enterprises and resident population on examination of the determinants of this process we found that the average wage rates and the ratio of utilized credit to the total line of credit negatively affect both indexes and that both indexes are affected positively by sector growth and by a measure of small firm presence the index of fertility is also explained by a dummy variable which identifies for each province those policies which are aimed at fostering the process of new firm formation the birth rate is instead affected by a dummy variable which is equal to one for the provinces in which the chief towns of each region are located and zero otherwise and by the potential demand for new producer services arising from the industrial sector

export restrictions and price insulation during commodity price booms for individual countries variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices if this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility this study shows the nature of the resulting collective action problem with the policy being ineffective on average in stabilizing domestic prices while increasing the volatility of the income transfers from terms of trade changes a simple approach to assessing the contribution of insulation to the price increases is developed and used with new estimates of agricultural distortions to assess its contribution to the price spikes in 1972 74 and 2006 08 for rice and wheat the analysis suggests that 45 percent of the increase in rice prices in 2006 08 and 30 percent of the increase in wheat prices was due to insulating behavior one sign of progress since 1972 74 was a substantial reduction in the extent of price insulating behavior by the industrial countries this provides little stabilizing benefit in the rice market because countries not classifying themselves at the world trade organization as developing account for only 3 percent of world rice consumption but it does offer some benefit for the wheat market where non developing countries account for 27 percent of consumption

implications of higher global food prices for poverty in low income countries in many poor countries the recent increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes of those selling food many of whom are relatively poor while hurting net food consumers many of whom are also relatively poor the impacts on poverty will certainly be very diverse but the average impact on poverty depends upon the balance between these two effects and can only be determined by looking at real world data results using household data for ten observations on nine low income countries show that the short run impacts of higher staple food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and by country but that poverty increases are much more frequent and larger than poverty reductions the recent large increases in food prices appear likely to raise overall poverty in low income countries substantially

risks and spatial connectivity evidence from food price crisis in rural indonesia abstract this paper examines the impact of the agricultural commodity price surge globally experienced in 2007 2008 and thereafter on income growth of agricultural producers and non producers using recent panel data from indonesia first during this period producers experienced significantly higher earnings and total income growth than non producers narrowing their income gap second the negative effect on non producers real incomes was smaller in spatially well connected areas where to mitigate the impact private transfers such as remittances as well as employment incomes increased among non producers in contrast government programs did not effectively cushion the income shock therefore informal insurance was more effective than formal government funded social protection programs to mitigate the crisis shock

state antitrust enforcement in the us and implications for small business entry and relocation this article examines the impact of the important yet little studied state level antitrust enforcement activity on entry and relocation behaviour by small us firms feinberg and husted 2011 have shown that this enforcement especially nonhorizontal cases may be viewed by potential entrants as a negative aspect of the state business climate however they did not pursue a more disaggregate analysis of small firm entry behaviour nor did they investigate different responses between manufacturing wholesaling and retailing firms another related issue is the extent to which state cases filed in tandem with federal investigations have the same impact on establishment entry as do purely independent cases these considerations are dealt with in this article the author uses annual state level data from the statistics of us business to examine entry and relocation reactions to state antitrust enforcement by firms within three small business categories 1 19 employees 20 99 employees 100 499 employees g

consumption risk technology adoption and poverty traps evidence from ethiopia much has been written on the determinants of input and technology adoption in agriculture with issues such as input availability knowledge and education risk preferences profitability and credit constraints receiving much attention this paper focuses on a factor that has been less well documented the differential ability of households to take on risky production technologies for fear of the welfare consequences if shocks result in poor harvests building on an explicit model this is explored in panel data for ethiopia historical rainfall distributions are used to identify the counterfactual consumption risk controlling for unobserved household and time varying village characteristics it emerges that not just ex ante credit constraints but also the possibly low consumption outcomes when harvests fail discourage the application of fertilizer the lack of insurance causes inefficiency in production choices