Pierre Biscaye and Ibrahim Goni Abdoulkadiri

12.15 p.m.: “Preparing for Floods: Information, Early Warnings, and Household Adaptation in Northern Nigeria”

Pierre Biscaye will present his paper co-authored with David A. Carroll II and Daouda Mahaman Sani (CERDI, Université Clermont Auvergne) on information and adapation to flood in rural Nigeria. 

Abstract

Floods impose large and recurrent costs on households in low-income settings, yet relatively little is known about how different interventions targeting the household information environment may lead to effective protective action. In particular, early warnings may have limited value when households do not know how to respond, lack trust, or do not receive the warnings in time, while preparedness information may have limited value when households do not know when action is necessary or face collective action constraints. This project studies these potentially complementary constraints through a community-level randomized experiment in flood-prone areas of northern Nigeria in coordination with the Nigerian Hydrological Services Agency. Communities will be assigned to receive actionable flood-preparedness information, enrollment in a system for locally disseminating early warnings, both interventions, or a control condition. We will conduct panel household surveys before the intervention and approximately one year later and also collect community-level data and measures of flood risk and exposure. The analysis will estimate the separate and combined effects of preparedness information and early warnings on protective investments and behaviors, agricultural and other anticipatory decisions, risk perceptions, and responses to realized flood events. We will further examine mechanisms and treatment heterogeneity to understand how impacts depend on underlying flood risk, prior experience, household constraints, and the receipt and perceived credibility of warnings. The project aims to shed light more broadly on when information can improve adaptation to increasingly salient environmental risks.

12.45 p.m.:  “The Spacial Transmission of Agricultural Shocks”

Ibrahim Goni Abdoulkadiri will discuss his ongoing research on risk and shock related to desert locust swarms in Ethiopia. 

Abstract

Market integration makes local prices less sensitive to local supply shocks and more sensitive to shocks elsewhere. We ask which shocks elsewhere matter, where a local shock propagates, and whether the supply a market can access in a given year insures it against local shocks. We propose a supply-side measure of market access, accessible supply: output in other locations weighted by trade costs. Because it varies with shocks in supplying areas, markets with identical market access can be very differently insured against the same local shock. Using Allen and Atkin's (2022) Indian district panel, we find that negative supply shocks in nearby districts raise local prices. In annual data, however, we find no evidence that accessible supply dampens the price response to local shocks. We then propose Ethiopia as a potential application, using desert locust swarms as quasi-random local supply shocks, and present suggestive evidence that exposure to the 2014 swarms reduced household output. Next steps are to estimate spatial impulse responses with monthly market prices and to build a structural model of trade and storage to quantify who bears a shock under alternative networks.