Marcel Fafchamps' Home Page


General Information

I am a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.

My office is E105 in the East Wing of Encina Hall. My office phone number is +1-650-497-4602. In case you need to send me anything, the mail address is FSI, Encina Hall, 616 Serra Street, Stanford CA 94305 (USA). My email address is fafchamp at stanford dot edu.

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 graduate 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 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 taught in the Department of Economics of Oxford University between July 1999 and October 2013, except for a sabbatical year spent in the department of economics at Harvard (2005-6) and half a year of sabbatical in the department of economics at Stanford (2012). While in Oxford I also served as deputy director and then co-director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies.

Here is a copy of my CV.

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.

    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.