Improving electricity access in low-income countries is a challenging problem because of the high costs of grid extension and low demand for grid electricity in rural areas. This study elucidates these constraints by analyzing poor households' willingness-to-pay for different types of...

This review examines the literature on the welfare impacts of infrastructure disruptions. There is widespread evidence that households suffer from the consequences of a lack of infrastructure reliability, and that being connected to the grid is not sufficient to close the infrastructure gap....

This study examines the asset gains to households in Kerala, India, from two types of labor migration: moving overseas versus moving within India for employment. It draws on panel data from waves of a representative household survey conducted in 1998 and 2003. Migrant households as a whole...

Do poor households shop in a way that leaves money on the table? A simple way to maximize consumption, conditional on available cash, is to avoid regularly purchasing small amounts of nonperishable goods when bulk discounts are available at modestly larger quantities. Using two-week transaction...

Dar es Salaam is frequently affected by severe flooding causing destruction and impeding daily life of its 4.5 million inhabitants. The focus of this paper is on the role of poverty in the impact of floods on households, focusing on both direct (damage to or loss of assets or property) and...

Restricting cross-border trade through export bans in an attempt to stabilize domestic prices has been a particularly popular policy tool used by many sub-Saharan countries in recent years. However, little is known about how the variability in harvests and seasonality - two critical dimensions...

Measuring and comparing the levels of household welfare and poverty in a country require cost-of-living differences across regions to be properly adjusted. In measuring the spatial cost of living, the recent literature underscores the importance of detailed product quality information in the...