More than 200 years after the King sold one of the “King’s commons” of Follafoss (located inthe current Verran municipality) to urban timber merchants, local people in some ways still behave as if the area is a kind of commons. The paper will outline the history of the transformation of the area from an 18th century King’s commons to a 21th century battleground for ideas about ancient access and use rights of community members facing rights of a commercial forest owner and the local consequences of national legislation.

We study the link between Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) and short-run nutrition outcomes among children age 5 years and younger. We use 2006 and 2010 survey data from Northern Ethiopia to estimate parameters of an exogenous switching regression. This allows us to measure the differential impacts of household characteristics on weight-for-height Z-score of children in member and non-member households in PSNP. We find that the magnitude and significance of household covariates differ in samples of children from PSNP and non-PSNP households.

We use recent panel data on Tanzanian farm households to investigate how previous exposure to weather shocks affects the impact of a current shock. Specifically, we investigate the impact of droughts on agricultural outcomes and investments in children’s health, measured by their short- and long-term nutritional status. As expected, we find that droughts negatively impact yields, with the impact increasing in the severity of the shock, and that severe droughts have a negative impact on short-term nutritional outcomes of children.