This paper tests the efficiency of insurance markets in the Pakistan Punjab by examining how crop choices are affected by the presence of price and yield risk. We estimate reduced-form and structural models of crop choices. Aithough we cannot reject the hypothesis that village members...

In this paper, the role of crop specialization and diversification in the process of agricultural transformation is empirically investigated for the case of Punjub. The analytical innovation of this paper is that changes in aggregate land productivity are structurally as-sociated with...

This paper investigates how to characterize each person's poverty status when his/her welfare level fluctuates and how to aggregate the status into chronic and transient poverty measures. The contribution of the paper is to clarify the sensitivity of relative magnitudes of chronic versus...

Myanmar's agricultural economy is in transition from a planned to a market system. However, the economy does not seem to capture the full gains of productivity growth expected from such a transition. Using a micro dataset collected in 2001 and covering more than 500 households in eight villages...

This paper investigates the extent to which rural households in developing countries are able to smooth consumption. A basic model of full-information intra-village risk sharing adopted by Townsend (1994) is extended to the case where participating households have different risk and time...

We propose a new methodological framework to empirically analyze the dynamics of growth, poverty, and inequalitythat incorporates the fact that the entire distribution of a welfare indicator, say, real percapita consumption, changes over time, and that empirical variables for growth, poverty,...

This paper investigates the effects of weather risk on the off-farm labor supply of agricultural households in a developing country. Faced with the uninsurable risk of output and food price fluctuations, poor farmers in developing countries may diversify labor allocation across activities in...

This paper looks at the case of Myanmar in order to investigate the behavior and welfare of rural households in an economy under transition from a planned to a market system. Myanmar's case is particularly interesting because of the country's unique attempt to preserve a policy of intervention...

Using microdata from the National Election Study of the 2004 parliamentary elections in India, we empirically examine the impact of political reservation for disadvantaged castes and tribes on voting behavior. We find that in a reserved constituency, where only members of the disadvantaged...