Document Type
Article
Date
7-2004
Keywords
tbd
Disciplines
Economics
Description/Abstract
Temporal climate risk weighs heavily on many of the world's poor. Model-based climate forecasts could benefit such populations, provided recipients use forecast information to update climate expectations. We test whether pastoralists in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya update
their expectations in response to forecast information and find that they indeed do, albeit with a systematic bias towards optimism. In their systematic optimism, these pastoralists are remarkably like Wall Street's financial analysts and stockbrokers. If climate forecasts have limited value to these pastoralists, it is due to the flexibility of their livelihood rather than an inability to process forecast information.
Recommended Citation
Lybbert, Travis J.; Barrett, Christopher B.; McPeak, John G.; and Luseno, Winnie, "Bayesian Herders: Asymmetric Updating of Rainfall Beliefs in Response to External Forecasts" (2004). Economics - All Scholarship. 81.
https://surface.syr.edu/ecn/81
Source
Harvested from ssrn.com
Additional Information
This manuscript is from the Social Science Research Network, for more information see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=431241#199658