Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / Barrett, Christopher B. / Carter, Michael R. / Chavas, Jean-Paul -- I. Nutrition, Health, and Human Capital Formation -- 1 Human Capital and Shocks. Evidence on Education, Health, and Nutrition / Frankenberg, Elizabeth / Thomas, Duncan...

The moral and economic imperatives to intervene in poverty traps motivate the identification of poverty traps and their structural causes so as to inform the design of appropriate policy responses. However, empirical identification remains challenging because of poverty traps' complexity. After...

Understanding why some human populations remain persistently poor remains a significant challenge for both the social and natural sciences. The extremely poor are generally reliant on their immediate natural resource base for subsistence and suffer high rates of mortality due to parasitic and...

This paper demonstrates that there are potentially large returns to social protection policy that stakes out a productive safety net below the vulnerable and keeps them from slipping into a poverty trap. Much of the value of the productive safety net comes from mitigating the ex ante effects of...

A sound understanding of poverty traps — defined as poverty that is self-reinforcing due to the poor's equilibrium behaviors — and their underlying mechanisms is fundamentally important to the development of policies and interventions targeted to assist the poor. We review the theoretical...