The policy failures associated with inappropriate acceptance of unitary models of household behavior are more serious than those associated with inappropriate acceptance of collective models, contend the authors. They support this claim with illustrations. Consider, for example, the effect of...

The paper provides the first large-scale survey-based evidence on the impact of the global food crisis of 2007-08 using an indicator of self-assessed food security from the Gallup World Poll. For the sampled countries as a whole, this subjective indicator of food security remained the same or...

Many agricultural regions in the developing world are subject to severe droughts, which can have devastating effects on household incomes and consumption, especially for the poor. To protect consumption, rural households engage in many different risk management strategies - some mainly...

For capturing dynamic demographic relationships, longitudinal household data can have considerable advantages over more widely used cross-sectional data. But because the collection of longitudinal data may be difficult and expensive, analysts must assess the magnitudes of the problems, specific...

Economic approaches to health and nutrition have focused largely on measures of child nutrition and related variables (such as birth weight) as indicators of household production of nutritional outcomes. But when dealing with adult nutrition, economists have to address an issue that has...

This report expands on a dynamic model of market integration to investigate how information is transmitted across commodities. The author investigates one property of an efficient market : the full use of available information. Studies of spatial price integration simultaneously looks at the...

Data from three rounds of nationally representative health surveys in India are used to assess the impact of selective mortality on children’s anthropometrics. The nutritional status of the child population was simulated under the counterfactual scenario that all children who died in the first...

Both public, and private resources contribute to children's nutritional status. And investments by one household may improve health in other neighborhood households, by improving the sanitation environment, and increasing shared knowledge. The authors measure the externalities of investments in...

Better health and nutrition are thought to improve children's performance in school, and therefore their productivity after school. Most literature ignores the fact that child health and schooling reflect behavioral choices, so the estimated impact of health and nutrition on a child's schooling...

How well do rural households in developing countries mitigate the income risk of the rural sector? There are several sensible reasons why households cannot fully insure consumption against income fluctuations. The well-known problems of moral hazard, information asymmetries, and deficient...