Marcel Fafchamps' Home Page


General Information

My office number is 2108 in the Department of Economics and my office phone number is +44-1865-281446. In case you need to send me anything, the mail address is Department of Economics, Oxford University, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ and the fax number is +44-1865-281447. My email address is marcel dot fafchamps at economics dot ox dot ac dot uk.

I am Professor of Development Economics in the Economics Department at Oxford University. I am also a Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College and serve as Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. I currently share my teaching among the MPhil graduate program in Economics and the MSc in Development Economics. I am not involved in undergraduate teaching and tutoring.

For more information about the Centre consult the Centre's web site.

I am a fellow of BREAD and CEPR and an International Research Fellow, Kiel Institute.

Who I am

I was born in Belgium in 1955. As an undergraduate, I attended the Universite Catholique de Louvain and got a 'Licence' in Law in 1978 and a 'Licence' in economics in 1980. After my military service, I spent nearly five years working for the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency overlooking issues of employment, income distribution, and vocational training. My responsability was rural development. I was based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia but I had to travel to all parts of Africa. From 1981 to 1985 I must have visited more than 20 of the 50 or so African states. I met my wife in Ethiopia and we got married in Nairobi in 1983.

Because I had developed a stong interest in research during my years in Africa, I went back to school in 1986. In August 1989 I completed a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of California at Berkeley for which I won an Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award from American Agricultural Economists Association. In the process of getting my degree I also spent 8 months in Hyderabad, India. During my stay I travelled throughout India and had an opportunity to compare the way people live there with what I had seen in Africa. Except for a quarter teaching at the University of Chicago in 1995, I spent the period between September 1989 and the Summer of 1996 teaching at the Food Research Institute.

Following the untimely closure of the Institute, I moved to the Department of Economics at Stanford where I taught for two years. I spent the 1998-99 academic year on sabbatical leave in the Research Department of the World Bank. I have been in the Department of Economics of Oxford University since July 1999, except for a sabbatical year spent in the department of economics at Harvard (2005-6).

I was in Stanford, away from Oxford on sabbatical leave, from January to July 2012.

Here is a copy of my CV.

What I teach

MPhil in Economics

Development Economics Core Course -- Michaelmas 2011

  • Look for the lecture notes on the Department's intranet.

    Treatment effects -- Advanced Econometrics -- Hilary 2010

  • Not taught 2011-12.

  • Stata simulation programs

    Growth Theory -- Advanced Macroeconomics -- Michaelmas

  • Look for the lecture notes on the Department's intranet.

    Network Analysis -- Advanced Microeconomics -- Hilary

  • Not taught 2011-12.

    To make ngreg accessible to Stata, unzip the following files in your c:\ado\personal directory or in your work directory.

  • Stata ado and help files for dyadic regression with corrected standard errors.

    MSc in Development Economics

    Microeconomic theory core -- Michaelmas

  • Look for the lecture notes on the Department's intranet.

    Additional resources:

  • Duclos's textbook on poverty and inequality.

    My research interests

    My research interests have evolved over time. Currently, my research revolves primarily around the following topics:
  • social networks;
  • intrahousehold allocation;
  • risk coping strategies and poverty.

    Here is a list of my publications:

    Here are some of the papers I am working on:

    Welcome to Africa

    In the mid 1990's I developed a computer simulation game to interest my Stanford undergraduates to rural life in Africa. The game was subsequently published by Walnut Creek CDRom. The CD has now long been out of print but I still receive occasional expressions of interest from people wishing to use it as instructional tool.

    I have therefore decided to make it available here in zipped form. Beware of the fact that it is over 66 MB large. You will need to unzip it onto your harddisk, and to install it by running the install.exe program. Enjoy.