Studies of inequality often ignore resource allocation within the household. In doing so they miss an important element of the distribution of welfare that can vary dramatically depending on overall environmental and economic factors. Thus, measures of inequality that ignore intra household...

We consider risk sharing in rural China during its rapid economic transformation from the late 1980s through the late 2000s. We document an erosion of consumption insurance against both household-level idiosyncratic and village-level aggregate income shocks, and show that this decline is related...