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This dissertation takes a welfare perspective to analyze how rural households in developing countries manage risks ex-ante and cope with shocks ex-post. The first part looks at risk-coping strategies and analyzes the socio-economic consequences of AIDS-related mortality in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Chapter 2 shows that households in rural Zambia are able to stabilize their per-capita incomes after the death of a prime-age member. Yet, risk-sharing arrangements appear to spread the burden beyond directly afflicted households. Chapter 3 demonstrates for North-Western Tanzania that the age at parental bereavement has important consequences for children's long-term capital accumulation in terms of both health and education. These effects, however, depend on the gender of the deceased parent. Preferences of the surviving parent partly protect same-sex children from the detrimental effects of orphanhood, suggesting that risks are not equally shared within households. The second part of the dissertation explores risk-management strategies and investigates the income diversification patterns of farm households in sub-Saharan Africa. Chapter 4 analyzes the dichotomy of the non-agricultural sector in Western Kenya and the resulting poverty and inequality implications. The results show that only rich households are able to overcome the entry barriers into high-return activities. Low-return activities, however, are not concentrated among the poor. The chapter also provides evidence that high-return non-agricultural activities are associated with increased agricultural productivity. Chapter 5 examines the determinants of diversification in Burkina Faso between 1994 and 2003. Diversification into non-agricultural activities appears to be mainly motivated by insurance motives. Yet, the patterns of diversification also reflect structural change offering better opportunities in the non-farm sector. The final part of the dissertation concentrates on Eastern Europe and looks at the we

This paper critically reviews what is known, based on analyses of micro-level U.S. data, about the role of religion in various interrelated decisions that people make over the life cycle, including investments in secular human capital, cohabitation, marriage, divorce, family size and employment. It also identifies gaps in our knowledge, and suggests agenda items for future research in the field. These include use of statistical models that allow for non-linearities in the effects associated with religious participation; consideration of contextual effects; and analyses that address anomalies found in earlier work regarding patterns of non-marital sex and divorce among conservative Protestants. Further work is also needed to increase our understanding of the role that religious factors are playing as various dimensions of the second demographic transition, along with elements of American exceptionalism, continue to unfold in the U.S.

Reducing child malnutrition is a key goal of most developing countries. To combat child malnutrition with the right set of interventions, policymakers need to have a better understanding of its economic, social and policy determinants. While there is a large literature that investigates the determinants of child malnutrition, it focuses almost exclusively on mean effects of these determinants. However, socioeconomic background variables and policy interventions may affect child nutrition differently at different points of the conditional nutritional distribution.

This paper presents a critical review and synthesis of recent research on the role of religion in economic and demographic behavior in the United States. Relationships reviewed include the effects of religion on investments in human capital, labor supply and wealth accumulation; union formation and dissolution; and fertility. The paper also comments on the growing literature on the implications of religious dissimilarity between the spouses; on two different, possibly countervailing ways in which religiosity may affect demographic and economic behavior; and on the importance of estimating models that allow for possible non-linearities in the effects of religiosity.

This paper examines the synchronous leisure of spouses and the extent to which spouses spend time together. The time budget data set used in this paper allows for a distinction between simultaneous time-use of spouses and the actual time that spouses meet. A comparison between couples and matched singles suggests that only about 12 percent (45 minutes per day) of the synchronous leisure is caused by active synchronization. Spouses' decisions about market work and leisure timing are very interdependent during most hours of the day. The results also suggest that, conditional on synchronous leisure, parents with high incomes spend more time together than others, while more educated people allocating less time to their spouses.

How does child spacing affect children‘s health in Austria? To address this question, I use the reform of 1990 in the Austrian parental leave (PL) system, which generates an exogenous variation in child spacing. The implementation of the reform enables me to work within a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and estimate the effect of child spacing on birth weight of a second born child. This setup is meant to reduce the bias that a OLS-approach would involve. In fact, my results reveal an unexpected negative impact of child spacing on birth weight in an excessive dimension. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate weaknesses in the estimation strategy and its identifying assumptions, Lucas Schönheit, Masterarbeit Universität Innsbruck 2018