In recent decades, the inability to quickly cope with shocks and stressors became perhaps the most serious threats to growth and development, and a matter of concern among development stakeholders. As a result, they are now prioritizing resilience building at individual, household, and community levels. By providing up to date analysis on key missing gaps, this dissertation contributes to the literature explaining the nexus between shocks, resilience, and development, and informs the policy-making process about mitigation of various shocks and stressors. Departing from the usual practice of assessing the impacts of COVID-19 on development outcomes, the first essay investigates the effects of six policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on the farm and nonfarm incomes of agricultural households using Nigeria as a case study. The roles of endogenous policies such as lockdowns and stay at home orders have hitherto not been addressed in the literature. Essay 1 also examines the roles of factors that provide households with absorptive, adaptive, and transformative resilience capacities during unprecedented shocks. The results suggest that policies that tend to increase family labor availability were beneficial for agricultural households on the short run. In addition, the ability of agricultural households to withstand the adverse effects of the policy responses to the pandemic depends on their land size, wealth level, and degrees of income diversification, involvement in processing activities, and reliance on hired labor. These results suggest that policy responses to a health crisis, specifically containment measures, which are aimed at overall mitigation of adverse impacts, need to consider the impacts on farm viability. Since agriculture is crucial to livelihoods in developing countries, its role may be compromised if policies enacted do not consider the effects on the sector.For sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, the second essay examines the short- and long-term effects of conflicts and droughts on agricultural growth and transformation trajectories using partial and total factor productivities measures as indicators of these processes. It also introduces an alternative approach to measuring resilience based on the timeframe in which the effects of a shock remain significant. The results suggest instantaneous and persistent disruptive effects of conflicts and droughts on the structure of agricultural production, which occur mainly through effects on quality and quantity of input use. Additionally, the overall structure of agricultural production is characterized by greater resilience to conflicts than droughts. By tying shocks to productivity, resilience and agricultural production in a temporal way, this study advances the literature in all three areas. Because productivity growth and agricultural transformation are cornerstone development strategies in SSA, these results are of high value to development stakeholders.In the third essay, the Nigerian experience with conflicts is used to study their short- and long-term effects on individuals' type of work (namely, family farm enterprises, family non-farm enterprises, and employment with others), and their effects on sectoral employment choices (namely, employment in agriculture, manufacturing, or services). For this purpose, the Nigerian General Household Survey is spatially joined with data on the location of conflict events and their associated number of fatalities. The findings provide evidence of significant labor reallocation effects of conflicts, which arise from the abandonment of farm activities and their replacement by employment in non-agricultural sectors. These effects are observed in both planting and harvesting seasons, suggesting that disruptions occur in both input- and output-related supply chains. Additionally, they differ across gender and skill levels. Hence, in addition to addressing the root causes of conflicts, improving access to education and labor market may be key ingredients of resilience building strategies.
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