Traditional poverty measures neglect several important dimensions of household welfare. In this paper we construct a measure of ‘vulnerability’ which allows us to quantify the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as the loss associated with any of a variety of different sources of...

It is a commonplace observation that risk-averse farmers ought to prefer less risk. In this paper, we provide three qualifications to this commonplace. First, we note that (properly defined) “less risk” need not imply “smaller variance.” Second, we note that when farmers produce under...

Processors, packer-shippers, integrators, and a variety of third-parties engage in a wide variety of different kinds of grading, intended to summarize quality characteristics of different kinds of foodstuffs. There are two ways in which these grading characteristics may be imperfect. First, they...

We describe a measure of welfare, "vulnerability", which measures the difference between the highest feasible average level of utility in a population given aggregate resources, and the actual average level of utility. This measure can be decomposed into two components, related to inequality and...

The (closely related) benefit is that we can get by without panel data, using instead only a relatively limited set of data obtainable from repeated cross-sectional surveys of household expenditures, of the sort that many countries conduct in order, for example, to compute consumer price indexes