How Do Households Allocate Risk?

How do health extension workers in Ethiopia allocate their time?

BACKGROUND Governments are increasingly reliant on community health workers to undertake health promotion and provide essential curative care. In 2003, the Government of Ethiopia launched the Health Extension Programme and introduced a new cadre, health extension workers (HEWs), to improve access to care in rural communities. In 2013, to inform the government's plans for HEWs to take on an enha...

How Do People Decide to Allocate Transfers Among Family Members?

Despite recent advances in data collection and the growing number of empirical studies that examine private intergenerational transfers, there still exist significant gaps in our knowledge. Who transfers what to whom, and why do they it? I argue that some of these gaps could be filled by departing from the standard parentchild framework and concentrating instead on fathers, mothers, sons and da...

How Do Households Respond to Uncertainty Shocks?

Economic disruptions generally coincide with heightened uncertainty. In the United States, uncertainty increased sharply with the recent housing market crash, financial crisis, deep recession, and uneven recovery. In July 2010 congressional testimony, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke described conditions as “unusually uncertain.” The uncertain landscape was also cited as a factor in the slow r...

How Do Households Respond to Income Shocks

How do households respond to income shocks?∗

Commonly used consumption/saving models have radically different implications for households response to income shocks, ranging from the hands-to-mouth model, where consumption bears all the adjustment, to the complete markets model, where wealth bears all the adjustment. In this paper we use the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth, which is the only available micro dataset that conta...