Cash transfers and nutrition: The role of market isolation after weather shocks

Cash transfers are a widely used policy instrument in Sub-Saharan Africa to shield vulnerable populations from malnutrition. In this paper, we focus on the role of local food markets after weather shocks as a facilitating factor for program impacts on nutrition. As food prices tend to be negatively correlated with households’ own production in isolated markets, we expect the purchasing power of cash transfers to decrease after harvest failures in such markets. To test this, we analyze the impact of Kenya’s Hunger Safety Net Programme during the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa, considering the impacts on food consumption and the availability of macro- and micro-nutrients at the household level. We particularly focus on heterogeneous program impacts depending on the exposure to the drought, measured with satellite imagery, and impacts depending on the isolation of local food markets, approximated by price differences between community and wholesale maize prices. Our findings indicate that, despite some encouraging effects on proxy indicators, the program does not have significant impacts on nutrient availability on average. However, we do observe significant positive impacts for drought affected households in less isolated communities.     

Cash transfers and high food prices: Explaining outcomes on Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme

An ongoing and highly politicised debate concerns the relative efficacy of cash transfers versus food aid. This paper aims to shed light on this debate, drawing on new empirical evidence from Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP). Our data derive from a two-wave panel survey conducted in 2006 and 2008. Ethiopia has experienced unprecedented rates of inflation since 2007, which have reduced the real purchasing power of PSNP cash payments. Our regression findings confirm that food transfers or ‘cash plus food’ packages are superior to cash transfers alone – they enable higher levels of income growth, livestock accumulation and self-reported food security. These results raise questions of fundamental importance to global humanitarian response and social protection policy. We draw out some implications for the design of social transfer programmes and describe some steps that could be taken to enable ‘predictable transfers to meet predictable needs’.     

Succession planning vs. agency theory: a test of Harris and Helfat's interpretation of plurality announcement market returns

In this note we respond to Harris and Helfat's (1998) reinterpretation of the results in Worrell, Nemec, and Davidson (1997) . Harris and Helfat argued that the negative stock market response associated with plurality announcements could be the result of inadequate corporate succession planning rather than with the agency cost explanation. Our results, here, show that duality and plurality announcements do not hurt shareholder wealth as long as there is an heir apparent and, therefore, are more consistent with the succession planning explanation than with agency theory. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.