"The primary goal of emergency food aid after an economic shock is often to bolster short-term food and nutrition security. However, these transfers also act as insurance against other shock effects, such as destruction of assets and changes in economic activity, which can have lasting...

Within many African households, agricultural production is simultaneously carried out on many plots controlled by different members of the household. Detailed plot-level agronomic data from Burkina Faso provides striking evidence of inefficiencies in the allocation of factors of production...

Drawing data from four different integrated household surveys in rural areas of Mali, Malawi, and two national surveys in Côte d'Ivoire, this paper tests the validity of proxy measures of household wealth and income that can be readily implemented in health surveys in rural Africa. The...

""This paper uses longitudinal data from 15 villages in rural Ethiopia to explore the nature and consequences of these links. It addresses the following questions: (1) What are the links between rural households and local urban centers? (2) Does better access to local market towns affect...

This paper examines the impact of improved water access on health and incomes in the developing world, drawing on contributions from public health, economics, and anthropology. It argues that the "biological" pathways are reasonably well understood, with the effectiveness of interventions being...

This paper uses a “natural experiment” in Canadian divorce law reform to discriminate empirically between unitary and Nash-bargained models of the household. Using time-series data from three Canadian provinces, it demonstrates that following landmark divorce law reforms in the...

"...There are sharply divergent views as to how much narrowly targeted interventions actually benefit the poor. These result from differing assessments of three issues: whether better targeting outcomes are likely to be achieved, whether such methods are cost-effective, and whether the living...

This paper examines the impact of rainfall shocks on a measure of adult health, body mass, drawing on a unique panel data set of households residing in rural Zimbabwe. Controlling for individual, household, and community factors, and individual fixed, unobservable effects, we find women, but not...

" This paper as exemplified by the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations, the reduction of poverty and hunger are now seen as central objectives of international development. Yet the modalities for attaining these goals are contested. Further, while it might be assumed that interventions...

Household food security is an important measure of well-being. Although it may not encapsulate all dimensions of poverty, the inability of households to obtain access to enough food for an active, healthy life is surely an important component of their poverty. Accordingly, devising an...