The Welfare Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia
研究了商品价格波动如何影响发展中国家农村家庭的福利，发现消除价格波动的福利收益随家庭收入增加而增加，使食品价格稳定政策在埃塞俄比亚农村具有分配上的累退性。
How does commodity price volatility affect the welfare of rural households in developing countries, for whom hedging and consumption smoothing are often difficult? When governments choose to intervene in order to stabilize commodity prices, as they often do, who gains the most? This article develops an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to answer those questions, along with illustrative empirical results based on panel data from rural Ethiopian households. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility are increasing in household income, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.