Marcel Fafchamps is Professor of Development Economics in the Economics Department at Oxford University. He is also a Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College and serves as Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. Fafchamps studied law and economics at the Universite Catholique de Louvain and spent nearly five years working on rural development for the International Labour Organization, based in Addis Ababa and involving travel to all parts of Africa. Having developed a stong interest in research during these years, he returned to university and in August 1989 completed a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of California at Berkeley, for which he won an Outstanding PhD Thesis Award from the American Agricultural Economists Association. In the process he spent eight months in Hyderabad, India. He taught at the Food Research Institute from 1989 until 1996, except for a quarter teaching at the University of Chicago in 1995. Following the closure of the Institute, he taught in the Department of Economics at Stanford University for two years. He then spent an academic year on sabbatical leave in the Research Department of the World Bank. He has been at Oxford since July 1999, except for a sabbatical year spent in the department of economics at Harvard (2005-6). Fafchamps has written on the behavior of individual households faced with imperfect or missing markets and on lobbying for trade protection and agricultural technology. His current research interests revolve primarily around market institutions and domestic trade, social networks, risk coping strategies and poverty, and allocation of economic activity across space. His research is concentrated mostly in Africa and South Asia. Much of his work on market institutions is summarized in a book published by MIT Press entitled "Market Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa", while some of his work on risk coping is summarized in a book entitled "Rural Poverty, Risk, and Development". Recent papers include work on social networks and on spatial welfare.
