Derived from livelihoods surveys and ethnographic material about people living on the chars, or river islands, in deltaic lower Bengal, this paper illustrates the complex, diverse and ingenious ways that the poor manage money. These islands constitute some of the most vulnerable locations...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time-specific aggregate effects, such as the stance of monetary policy or the...

This chapter focuses on the Indian experience with dietary changes, their nutritional implications, and policy response to alleviate nutritional deprivation. We review the evidence on nutrient intake and dietary changes, particularly the downward shift in calorie, protein and other nutrient...

The Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) — the largest food subsidy programme in India — has been a dismal failure in targeting the poor. The present paper examines its performance in three Indian states — Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, based on primary data collected for...

In a recent study, Jensen and Miller (2011) propose a new measure of undernutrition, based on a calorie share of staples threshold. Among the merits of this measure are that (i) it dispenses with calorie norms, and (ii) relies on a behavioural approach to estimate this threshold. What our...

Our study examines changes in diets over the period 1993-2004. Diets have shifted away from cereals towards higher consumption of fruits, vegetables, oils and livestock products. Using household data, reduced form demand relations are estimated for nine food commodities. Significant own and...

This paper studies the eect of a sharp rice price increase on welfare and poverty in Bangladesh. We employ household expenditure information to estimate the welfare loss in- duced by the price increase. Our ndings suggest that we underestimate the proportionate welfare loss for the rice...

Using ARIS/REDS data set for 2006 for rural India this paper models household vulnerability as expected utility and its components. We conclude, first, that between the years 1999 and 2006 household vulnerability is most explained by poverty and idiosyncratic components. Second, for risk coping...

Applying the variance decomposition developed by Asdrubali et al. (1996), the paper explores for the first time the role and the extent of smoothing channels at a micro level using a sample of UK households. Our empirical analysis of British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data concludes that the...

This paper investigates the influence of perception of natural disaster risks on the probability of local people to participate in a hypothetical disaster microinsurance. We use household data for a specific disaster risk of the Mount Merapi in Java. We find that respondent's perception of...