This paper investigates whether there is a non-linear relationship between income and the private transfers received by households in developing countries. If private transfers are unresponsive to household income, expansion of public social security and other transfer programs is unlikely to...

We examine the ongoing transition from centrally planned to market agriculture in rural China. In particular, we examine the devolution of land rights from village governments to villagers and the corresponding evolution of tenure security in agricultural land. We find econometric support for...

The demographic evidence of gender bias in many countries has provided an impetus for finding ways to study the status of women in developing countries. Because of the lack of accurate intra-household data, Deaton [1989] introduced a method for using household expenditure data to infer...

Researchers often use unit values (household expenditures on a commodity divided by the quantity purchased) as proxies for market prices when calculating poverty lines and estimating consumer demand equations. Such proxies are often needed because community price surveys in developing economies...

The supermarket revolution is spreading faster in China than anywhere else in the world. Supermarket sales are growing by 30-40% per year, 2-3 times faster than in other developing regions. This development has been driven by factors shared by other developing countries as well as by...

We use household data from northeast China to examine the link between investment and land tenure insecurity induced by China's system of village-level land reallocation. We quantify expropriation risk using a hazard analysis of individual plot tenures and incorporate the predicted "hazards of...