Over the past two decades, more than half the population in rural Tanzania migrated within the country, profoundly changing the nature of traditional institutions such as informal risk sharing. Mass internal migration has created geographically disperse networks, on which the authors collected...

We develop new tests for the completeness of rural labor markets. The tests are based on a theoretical link between a shortage or surplus in the labor market and asymmetric responses to changes in household composition over time. We develop auxiliary tests to distinguish other types of market...

While city migrants see their welfare increase much more than those moving to towns, many more rural-urban migrants end up in towns. This phenomenon, documented in detail in Kagera, Tanzania, begs the question why migrants move to seemingly suboptimal destinations. Using an 18-year panel of...