Christine Moser

Western Michigan University | WMU · Department of Economics

Foodborne diseases exact a large health toll in low and middle-income countries. We review the empirical research on the safety of food produced and consumed in these settings. We follow the value chain, from consumer demand to agricultural production, to describe existing knowledge and identify gaps for future research. We identify factors that co...

The lack of a reliably safe food supply in developing countries imposes both health and economic costs. Food safety is one of several dimensions of food quality that are typically unobservable at the time of purchase. Branding can overcome this information problem by allowing firms to build reputations based on the quality of their products. If a r...

While fertility rates generally fall over time as an economy develops, there is also evidence, primarily from developed countries, of pro-cyclical fertility. Fertility rates are correlated with short-run economic fluctuations because women delay pregnancy in poor economic times and periods of uncertainty, and increase fertility when conditions impr...

International conservation groups pour millions of dollars into developing countries to help preserve resources and set conservation priorities, but critics argue that affected populations are often excluded from the decision-making process. In 2003 many in the international community praised the president of Madagascar for his pledge to more than...

Many developing countries have introduced social health insurance programs to help address two of the United Nations' millennium development goals-reducing infant mortality and improving maternal health outcomes. By making modern health care more accessible and affordable, policymakers hope that more women will seek prenatal care and thereby improv...

This paper explores the effect of risk and socioeconomic factors on maternal mortality at the community level in Madagascar using a unique, nationwide panel of communes (i.e., counties). Previous work in this area uses individual or cross-country data to study maternal mortality, however, studying maternal mortality at the community level is impera...

While several cross-country studies have demonstrated that property rights institutions are crucial for economic growth, empirical evidence of this relationship within countries is limited. This article analyses the link between property rights institutions and development at a local level with two rounds of a unique dataset covering almost all of...

Despite the presumed importance of a strong state in the development process, there has been very little empirical work assessing the state’s ability to exercise power in isolated areas and understanding the means through which the state exerts that power. This paper begins to fill this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between st...

Switching regime models, including the Parity Bounds Model, are commonly used for assessing market integration, although they are not well suited to multiple market contexts. We develop an alternative structural model of markets that incorporates explanatory variables and generates the probability that a single market is integrated, therefore makin...

What determines the placement of development projects within a country? While there is a large empirical and theoretical literature related to cross-country aid allocation, there have been no comprehensive empirical studies looking at how development projects are allocated within a single country. This paper demonstrates that the allocation of exte...

This paper explores the adoption of two agricultural technologies, how their patterns of adoption differ, and the relationship between them. The first technology, the System of Rice Intensification, has been studied previously and high rates of disadoption were observed in some areas. The second technology is off-season cropping, the practice of gr...

The dramatic increase in the price of rice and other commodities over the past year has generated new interest in how these markets work and how they can be improved. This article uses an exceptionally rich data set to test the extent to which markets in Madagascar are integrated across space at different scales of analysis and to explain some of t...

This article uses data from Madagascar to examine how an upcoming election or political patronage might induce governments to deviate from goals such as poverty reduction. Using a nationwide, commune-level data set, the article tests three competing explanations of how public goods are allocated across districts. Projects can be allocated on the ba...

Madagascar is well-known among conservationists for both its unique forest ecosystems and its alarmingly high rates of deforestation. This paper studies the factors driving deforestation in Madagascar using a nation-wide data set of commune-level variables. The analysis suggests that higher population and fertility rates were associated with higher...

Most studies of deforestation rely on land-cover data interpreted from satellite images. However, it is often difficult, particularly in moist forest areas, to obtain cloud-free images. Dropping or imputing missing values from satellite data relies on the assumption of independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), which implies that clouds are ind...

This article explores the dynamics of smallholder technology adoption, with particular reference to a high-yielding, low external input rice production method in Madagascar. We present a simple model of technology adoption by farm households in an environment of incomplete financial and land markets. We then use a probit model and symmetrically cen...

This paper uses an exceptionally rich data set to test the extent to which markets in Madagascar are integrated across space, time, and form (in converting from paddy to rice) and to explain some of the factors that limit arbitrage and price equalization within a single country. In particular, we use rice price data across four quarters of 2000-200...

We introduce a method for properly attributing observed productivity and risk changes among new production methods, farmers, and plots by controlling for farmer and plot heterogeneity. Results from Madagascar show that the new system of rice intensification (SRI) is indeed a superior technology. Although about half of the observed productivity gain...

In assessing the productivity gains of a new technology, it is often difficult to determine the extent to which observed output gains are due to the technology itself, rather than to the skill of the farmer or the quality of the plot on which the new technology is tried. This problem of attribution is especially important when technologies are not...

This paper investigates the relationship between criminal activity and geographical isolation. Using data from Madagascar, we show that, after we control for population composition and risk factors, crime increases with distance from urban centres and, with few exceptions, decreases with population density. In Madagascar, crime and insecurity are a...

Low external-input agricultural technologies are commonly developed for and promoted in poor rural areas of the developing world because they are presumably more appropriate for farmers who may not have the access or ability to adopt methods requiring significant purchased inputs. The System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a low external-input (LEI)...

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has received a fair amount of attention in recent years both in and outside of Madagascar, where incredible yield increases have been achieved using few external inputs and less water and seed. SRI initially seemed well suited to Madagascar due to the unavailability or cost of fertilizer and the inability of...

Although rice accounts for approximately forty-four percent of land under cultivation and forty-six percent of caloric intake in Madagascar, most farmers cannot produce enough rice to feed their families. Total rice production increased little in the country during the 1990s, and yields were stagnant and well below world average yields. Because of...