Download or read book Consumption Smoothing Across Space written by Jonathan Morduch and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consumption Smoothing Across Seven Countries written by Bernd Fitzenberger and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consumption Smoothing in Village Economies written by Edward J. Seiler and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Wealth Race and Consumption Smoothing of Typical Income Shocks written by Peter Ganong and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We estimate the elasticity of consumption with respect to income using an instrument based on firm-wide changes in pay. While much of the consumption-smoothing literature uses variation in unusual windfall income, this instrument captures the temporary income variation that households typically experience. Furthermore, this estimator is precise, allowing us to address an open question about how much the elasticity varies with wealth. We find a much lower consumption response for high-liquidity households, which may help discipline structural models. We then use this instrument to study how wealth shapes racial inequality. An extensive body of work documents a substantial racial wealth gap. However, less is known about how this gap translates into differences in welfare on a month-to-month basis. We find that black (Hispanic) households cut their consumption 50 (20) percent more than white households when faced with a similarly-sized income shock. Nearly all of this differential pass-through of income to consumption is explained, in a statistical sense, by differences in liquid wealth. Combining our empirical estimates with a model, we show that the welfare cost of income volatility is at least 50 percent higher for black households and 20 percent higher for Hispanic households than it is for white households.

Download or read book Smoothing Consumption Across Households and Time written by Cynthia Georgia Kinnan and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies two strategies that households may use to keep their consumption smooth in the face of fluctuations in income and expenses: credit (borrowing and savings) and insurance (state contingent transfers between households). The first chapter asks why insurance among households in rural Thai villages is incomplete. The second chapter analyzes the impacts of micro-credit. The third chapter examines the interaction between interpersonal insurance and access to savings. The first chapter is motivated by the observation that interpersonal insurance within villages is an important source of insurance, yet consumption, while much smoother than income, is not completely smooth. That is, insurance is incomplete. This chapter attempts to identify the cause of this incompleteness. Existing research has suggested three possibilities: limited commitment-the inability of households to commit to remain within an insurance agreement; moral hazard-the need to give households incentives to work hard; and hidden income-the inability of households to verify one another's incomes. I show that the way in which "history" matters can be used to distinguish insurance constrained by hidden income from insurance constrained by limited commitment or moral hazard. This history dependence can be tested with a simple empirical procedure: predicting current marginal utility of consumption with the first lag of marginal utility and the first lag of income, and testing the significance of the lagged income term. This test is implemented using panel data from households in rural Thailand. The results are consistent with insurance constrained by hidden income, rather than limited commitment or moral hazard. I test the robustness of this result to measurement error using instrumental variables and by testing over-identifying restrictions on the reduced form equation for consumption. I test robustness to the specification of the utility function by nonparametric ally estimating marginal utility. The results suggest that constraints arising from private information about household income should be taken into account when designing safety net and other policies. My second chapter (co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Rachel Glennerster) uses a randomized trial to analyze the impacts of micro credit in urban South India. We find that more new businesses are created in areas where a micro credit branch opens. Existing business owners increase their spending on durable goods but not non-durable consumption. Among households that did not have a business before the program began, those with high estimated propensity to start a business reduce non-durable consumption and increase spending on durables in treated areas. Those with low estimated propensity to start a business increase non-durable consumption and spend no more on durables. This suggests that some households use micro credit to pay part of the fixed cost of starting a business, some expand an existing business, and others pay off more expensive debt or borrow against future income. We find no effects on health, education, or women's empowerment. My third dissertation chapter (co-authored with Arun Chandrasekhar and Horacio Larreguy) is motivated by the observation that the ability of community members to insure one another may be significantly reduced when community members also have the ability to privately save some of their income. We conducted a laboratory experiment in rural South India to examine the impact of savings access on informal insurance. We find that transfers between players are reduced when savings is available, but that, on average, players smooth their consumption more with savings than without. We use social network data to compute social distance between pairs, and show that limited commitment constraints significantly limit insurance when risk-sharing partners are socially distant, but not when pairs are closely connected. For distant pairs, access to savings helps to smooth income risk that is not insured interpersonally.

Download or read book Consumption Smoothing Habit Persistence and the Optimal Consumption Path written by Hassan Molana and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consumption Smoothing Among Working class American Families Before Social Insurance written by John A. James and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Income Smoothing and Consumption Smoothing written by Jonathan Morduch and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Climate Change Adaptation and Social Resilience in the Sundarbans written by Anna O'Donnell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Household vulnerability to weather shocks and changing climatic conditions has become a major concern in developing countries. Yet the empirical evidence remains limited on the impact that changing environmental conditions have on households. This book explores climate change adaptation using a social resilience approach. The book is based on primary data from the Sundarbans, a densely populated area located across parts of Bangladesh and India (West Bengal) which is highly vulnerable to extreme weather events and climate change. The focus is on assessing how households are affected by cyclones: whether they are able to cope with, adapt to and recover from events and changes; whether they are warned ahead of time; whether they benefit from government safety nets and other social programs; and finally whether they are driven to either temporary or permanent migration. This assessment leads to a better understanding of how exposure to an area of climate change vulnerability and risk affects and shapes human responses.

Download or read book High consumption Volatility written by Philippe Auffret and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2003 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of repeated external and domestic shocks has made economic insecurity a major concern across the Caribbean region. Of particular concern to all households, especially the poorest segments of the population, is the exposure to shocks that are generated by catastrophic events or natural disasters. The author shows that despite high consumption growth, the Caribbean region suffers from a high volatility of consumption that decreases household welfare. After presenting some empirical evidence that consumption volatility is higher in the Caribbean region than in the rest of the world, he makes some empirically testable inferences that help explain consumption volatility. The author develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the effects of catastrophic events on household and aggregate welfare. According to this framework, the volatility of consumption comes from production shocks that are transformed into consumption shocks mostly because of underdeveloped or ineffective risk-management mechanisms. Auffret conducts an empirical analysis of the impact of catastrophic events on 16 countries (6 from the Caribbean region and 10 from Latin America) from 1970-99 and shows that catastrophic events lead to: 1) A substantial decline in the growth of output. 2) A substantial decline in the growth of investment. 3) A more moderate decline in consumption growth (most of the decline is in private consumption, while public consumption declines moderately. 4) A worsening of the current account of the balance of payments.

Download or read book The Fourth Wave written by Jennifer Klot and published by UNESCO. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Food Security and Sustainability written by George Mergos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume brings together contributions from experts on a range of food security issues, and examines them through a number of case studies. A Millennium Development goal and important policy concern, food security is experiencing renewed interest due to globalisation, which has led to population affluence, changing consumption, and production and trade patterns. The authors discuss how globalisation brings a new dimension to the discussion on public policy on food security, and consider the extent to which Global Value Chains (GVCs) dominate trade, investment and international agricultural markets. Food Security and Sustainability therefore sheds new light on the nexus of food security and globalization, as well as its implications for investment and financing in the agro-food sector. The volume draws on papers presented at the inaugural Workshop of the Mediterranean Center for Food Security and Sustainable Growth (MED-SEC), an international network of academics focusing on issues of development, sustainability and food security.

Download or read book Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 2005 written by François Bourguignon and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Presents selected papers from the 16th Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics, held in May 2004. It reviews the lessons of 60 years of development experience, addressing topics such as infrastructure, behavioural economics, trade, poverty, and globalization.

Download or read book One Illness Away written by Anirudh Krishna and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first large-scale examination of the reasons why people fall into poverty and how they escape it in diverse contexts. It draws on personal interviews with 35,000 households in India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and the United States.

Download or read book Economic Costs of Drought and Rice Farmers Coping Mechanisms written by and published by Int. Rice Res. Inst.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Poverty and Policy written by Michael Lipton and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1993 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Microfinance Impact written by Ranjula Bali Swain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financial inclusion through microfinance has become a powerful force in improving the living conditions of poor farmers, rural non-farm enterprises and other vulnerable groups. In its unique ability to link the existing extensive network of India’s rural bank branches with the Self Help Groups (SHG), the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has covered up to 97 million poor households by March 2010 under its Self Help Group Bank Linkage Programme. Policy-makers have proclaimed SHGs as ‘‘the most potent initiative ... for delivering financial services to the poor in a sustainable manner." This book presents a comprehensive scientific assessment of the impact of the Self Help Group Bank Linkage Programme (SBLP) on the member households. The book discusses wide-ranging topics, including the rural financial sector in India, the history and structure of the SBLP, the impact methodologies, the economic and social impact of microfinance, its role in building assets while reducing poverty and vulnerability, the role of women and their empowerment, training and accumulation of human capital and policy implications of lessons learned. The empirical results show that vulnerability of the more mature SHG members declines significantly. Vulnerability also falls for villages with better infrastructure and for SHGs that are formed by NGOs and linked by banks. The results strongly demonstrate that on average, there is a significant increase in the empowerment of the female participants. The economic impact of SBLP is found to be the most empowering. Greater autonomy and changes in social attitudes also lead to female empowerment. The investigation further reveals that training (especially business training) has a definite positive impact on assets but not on income. The impact of training can be improved through better infrastructure (as in paved roads), linkage model type, and the training organiser. Bridging the gap in the existing literature and between academics and practitioners, this book moves beyond the usual theoretical issues in the impact assessment literature and draws on new developments in methodology. It will be of interest to academics, development practitioners and students of economics, political science, sociology, public policy and development studies.