Quentin Stoeffler

• PhD
• Associate professor (MCF HDR) at University of Bordeaux

Turkey has experienced periods of high growth as well as important economic, political, and health crises over the last two decades. Based on two nationally representative surveys conducted yearly between 2003 and 2021, this study tracks changes in poverty indices and in the factors associated with poverty during this period. The results show a rap...

Policy makers search for strategies to promote resilience and mitigate the effects of future climatic shocks. In this paper, we assess whether small regular cash transfers strengthen poor households' ability to mitigate the welfare effects of drought shocks. We analyze mechanisms through which cash transfers contribute to resilience, including savi...

Index insurance is a promising avenue for addressing risk in developing countries, but pilot index insurance projects are rarely scaled-up because demand remains disappointingly low. This article studies an area-yield insurance product which generated high demand and sales in Burkina Faso, and was subsequently scaled up nationally. We exploit exper...

This paper examines whether agricultural insurance can boost investment by small scale farmers in West Africa. It is based on a randomized evaluation designed to analyze the impacts of index insurance for cotton farmers in Burkina Faso. No impact of insurance was found on cotton, but, consistent with microeconomic theory, significant spillover impa...

We are very grateful to Karim Pare and his team for excellent data collection efforts. We thank Thomas Barré for useful comments and suggestions, as well as seminar participants at Istanbul Technical University, Bahçeşehir University, Boğaziçi University and various conferences. We also thank Inclusive Guarantee and SOFITEX for their support and fo...

This article presents a field‐based review of existing mechanisms in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for targeting poor households as beneficiaries of social programs. We surveyed 69 programs from diverse organizations in five regions of the DRC. Our approach is in contrast with the existing targeting literature that focuses on single public...

For those developing satellite-based insurance products, there is no consensus in the scientific community on which of the many available indices most accurately track agro-ecological shocks as experienced by farmers and pastoralists. Furthermore, metrics commonly used by the remote sensing community for assessing the accuracy of indices in retriev...

Cash transfer programmes have spread rapidly as an instrument to raise household consumption and reduce poverty. Questions remain if cash transfers can foster investments in productive assets in addition to raising immediate consumption among the very poor, particularly in rural Africa. Further, can asset investment gains be sustained over the medi...

Can insurance cost-effectively mitigate the increasingly deleterious impacts of climate risk on poverty and food insecurity? The theory reviewed in this chapter suggests an affirmative answer if well-designed insurance contracts can be implemented and priced at a reasonable level despite the uncertainties that attend climate change. Evidence from t...

Background In Africa, health research on indigent people has focused on how to target them for services, but little research has been conducted to identify the social groups that compose indigence. Our aim was to identify what makes someone indigent beyond being recognised by the community as needing a card for free healthcare. Methods We used dat...

Identifying and selecting poor households with efficient targeting methods is essential for effective poverty alleviation programs. This paper assesses the ex-post performance of two popular targeting mechanisms, Proxy Means Testing (PMT) and Community-Based Targeting (CBT), in a pilot cash transfer program in Cameroon. Several indicators and metri...

The heterogeneity in farmer crop portfolios observed empirically in a given location is puzzling. Even in the presence of higher-return alternatives, a large number of households focus on low-yield food crops, and portfolio choices vary among apparently similar households. This article aims at understanding better crop portfolio choices in Burkina...

Zimbabwe experienced an acute social, political, and economic crisis from 2001 to 2008 and is now on a recovery path. This paper explores changes in poverty between 2001, 2007, and 2011–2012 using an Alkire–Foster multidimensional poverty index. Results indicate a large increase in poverty across multiple dimensions of household wellbeing between 2...

This dissertation focuses on identifying the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and the potential of social assistance programs to address their condition. Each essay is related to one particular key step of the poverty alleviation agenda: poverty definition and measurement in Zimbabwe; targeting poor households in Cameroon; and impact evaluation...

Cash transfers programs are an increasingly popular tool to alleviate poverty by raising households’ consumption and well-being. However, the sustainability of the short-term improvement induced by the transfers is still an open question in Sub-Saharan Africa. By studying a cash transfer project in rural Niger 18 months after its termination, this...