We provide new micro evidence on the discussion about the relationship between financial development and welfare. Relying on the concept of local financial development our analysis focuses on three dimensions of household welfare: vulnerability to poverty, investment, and consumption smoothing....

Rain-index insurance is strongly advocated in many parts of the developing world to help farmers to cope with climatic risk that prevail in (semi-)arid rangelands due to low and highly uncertain rainfall. We present a modeling analysis of how the availability of rain-index insurance affects the...

This paper evaluates the effect of AIDS-related mortality on per-capita incomes of surviving household members, using a large nationally representative sample of rural households from Zambia. To minimize selection bias that may arise because AIDS is likely to be the endogenous outcome of...

Several measures of vulnerability to poverty have been suggested in the literature. In practice, only little is known about the robustness of vulnerability comparisons based on these often quite specific measures. The theory of stochastic orders can be applied to shed some light on such issues....