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...

Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (i) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (ii) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (iii) a significant decline in marriage and a rise in divorce; (iv)...

Obesity is an important global health problem. Although obesity is not directly related to access to health care or constrained by resource deprivation, overweight status is predominantly found in poor, less-educated populations. This paper seeks to identify the causal role of schooling in...

China's recently implemented New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), the largest social pension program in the world, was designed to provide financial protection for its rural population and reduce economic inequities. Yet the impact of this program is mitigated if those eligible fail to enroll. This...

This paper addresses the role of tropical disease in rural demography and land use rights, using data from Onchocerciasis (river blindness) control in Burkina Faso. We combine a new survey of village elders with historical census data for 1975-2006 and geocoded maps of treatment under the...

Most people in rural Africa do not have bank accounts. In this paper, we combine experimental and survey evidence from Western Kenya to document some of the supply and demand factors behind such low levels of financial inclusion. Our experiment had two parts. In the first part, we waived the...

It has been argued that since 2014, under the BJP-led central government, welfare benefits in India have become better targeted and less prone to clientelistic control by state and local governments. Arguably this has helped to increase the vote share of the BJP vis-a-vis regional parties. We...

Using rural household survey data from West Bengal, we find that voters respond positively to excludable government welfare benefits but not to local public good programs, while reporting having benefited from both. Consistent with these voting patterns, shocks to electoral competition induced...

In recent decades contract farming has emerged as a popular mechanism to encourage vertical coordination in developing country agriculture. The goal of such coordination is to better integrate smallholder farmers into the modern agricultural food system, fostering rural transformation. We use...

This paper examines the impact of California's hospital closures occurring from 1995-2011 on adjusted inpatient mortality for time-sensitive conditions: sepsis, stroke, asthma/chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Using a difference- in-difference...