Vulnerability assessment using composite indices provides critical information for the policymakers on why certain regions are impacted more than the others. Several researchers have assessed the vulnerability to hazard in diverse spatial and environmental settings, however, not many studies have assessed the vulnerability to flood hazards in Bihar, where flooding is a perennial event.

Employing a multilevel model, this paper demonstrates the importance of contextual effects, over and above the compositional effects, in shaping the geographical pattern of agricultural diversification towards high value crops. The results reveal that, besides household-level differences, the contextual effects of higher geographical levels, especially states and villages, explain significant variation in land-use under high value crops, but these do not apply to all types of crops and farm classes in a similar manner.

Drought is an important downside risk in Indian agriculture; and the spatial differences in its intensity and probability of occurrence are considerable. To develop strategies to manage the risk of drought, and to coordinate and implement these strategies, it is essential to understand the variation in drought risk across geographical or administrative levels. This paper, using a multilevel modeling approach, decomposes the variation in drought risk across states, regions, districts, villages and households, and finds it disproportionately distributed.

Despite the great strides by the government of Tanzania in bolstering access to electricity in rural areas under its Rural Energy Agency (REA), rural connection rates have remained low. A substantial fraction of households residing “under the grid” remains unconnected despite the considerable state subsidy of this program. This study investigates the reasons for low uptake of seemingly highly subsidized, productive and modern energy. Using both bivariate and multivariate logit, we find that the distance between the household and the nearest electric pole matters.

To evaluate the management of Chilean universities in terms of their role as knowledge generators, the DEA methodology was applied to a subset of universities. Next, a fractional probit model was estimated with the efficiency scores obtained to explore factors that influence performance. The results show high levels of efficiency in research, with private institutions reporting higher scores than state institutions, and some important factors being detected in obtaining that performance.