Standard methods of poverty measurement assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods can provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why...

Household scale economies are plausibly attributed to shared household public goods that make larger households better off at the same level of per capita resources. Larger households should therefore have higher per capita consumption of private goods, such as food, provided that they do not...

In spite of India's rapid economic growth, there has been a sustained decline in per capita calorie consumption during the last twenty-five years. While the decline has been largest among better-off households, it has taken place throughout the range of household per capita total expenditure....

"I argue that progress in understanding economic development (as in other branches of economics) must come from the investigation of mechanisms; the associated empirical analysis can usefully employ a wide range of experimental and non-experimental methods. I discuss three different areas of...

RCTs would be more useful if there were more realistic expectations of them and if their pitfalls were better recognized. For example, and contrary to many claims in the applied literature, randomization does not equalize everything but the treatment across treatments and controls, it does not...

We investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural Maharashtra in India. We estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0.3=9C0.5, a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom. The elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far...