Symposium on Consumption Smoothing in Developing Countries

This symposium explores how households in low-income countries, even without access to formal credit and insurance markets, find ways to smooth consumption in the face of large shocks to their income. This general area of risk sharing and consumption smoothing has received a great deal of attention from development economists in the last five years. The papers highlight the extent to which theoretical work in mechanism design, contract theory, and information economics has informed recent work in development economics. These papers also underscore the ways large, detailed household level data sets have recently been applied in developing country research.