We use a randomized controlled trial to study the effect of large income changes, through unconditional cash transfers, on the food share of expenditures and consumption of calories among poor households in rural Kenya. Our preferred estimate of the food elasticity following USD 709 transfers is...

Globally, men and women face markedly different risks of obesity. In all but of handful of (primarily Western European) countries, obesity is more prevalent among women than men. In this paper, we examine several potential explanations for this phenomenon. We analyze differences between men and...

This paper uses height data recorded on Convict Indents to study temporal patterns and regional differences in living standards in pre-famine Ireland. The approach is explicitly comparative and makes use of information from America and other parts of Europe. The Irish attained roughly the 16th...

We study the causes of "nutritional inequality": why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using event study designs exploiting supermarket entry and households' moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have meaningful effects on...

How much do calorie requirements vary across households and how do they affect food consumption patterns? Since caloric intake is a widely-used indicator of poverty and welfare, investigating changes in caloric requirements and food consumption patterns is important, especially for the poor....

In contrast with the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, Brazil's poverty rate is estimated to have decreased between 2019 and 2020 to 13.1 percent. Auxilio Emergencial (AE), a large emergency cash transfer program launched in April 2020, is believed to be the main driver of that decrease,...

Mozambique's economy has experienced strong growth over the last two decades, with GDP expanding at an annual average rate of 7.2 percent. However, this growth has been unequally shared and rural areas still lag far behind urban centers in both monetary and non-monetary dimensions of wellbeing....