Many developing countries use food-price subsidies or price controls to improve the nutrition of the poor. However, subsidizing goods on which households spend a high proportion of their budget can create large wealth effects. Consumers may then substitute towards foods with higher...

We study the effect on nutrition of an exogenous increase in food grain subsidy in rural India resulting from a program targeting the poor. Our analysis suggests that increase in income resulting from the food price subsidy changed consumption patterns in favor of the subsidized grains and...

Iron deficiency anemia is frequent among the poor worldwide. While it can be prevented with the appropriate supplement or food fortification, these programs often do not consistently reach the poorest. This paper reports on the impact of a potential strategy to address iron deficiency anemia in...

Worldwide, extreme poverty is often concentrated in spaces where people and property are not safe enough to sustain effective markets, and where development assistance is dangerous - and might even induce violence. Expanding governance by coercively taking control of territory may enable markets...

This paper investigates the institutional causes of China's Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered...

In this essay, I review Robert Fogel's The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 which is concerned with the past, present, and future of human health. Fogel's work places great emphasis on nutrition, not only for the history of health, but for explaining aspects of current health,...

We examine the extent to which food insecurity questions and the standard poverty measure are correlated with various dietary and physiologic outcomes. Our findings suggest that the correlations vary tremendously by age. We find that the food insecurity questions are correlated with the dietary...

The six principal findings of this paper are as follows: (1) crisis mortality accounted for less than 5 percent of total mortality in England prior to 1800 and the elimination of crisis mortality accounted for just 15 percent of the decline in total mortality between the eighteenth and...