Essays on Households’ Well-Being and Resilience to Shocks

This dissertation investigates households’ well-being and resilience to shocks in low- and lower-middleincome countries through three empirical essays. It advances understanding of how households respond and adapt to adverse events, how context-specific factors shape resilience, and how different subjective measures capture well-being and deprivation under various scenarios. The first essay examines resilience to food insecurity in Malawi in the face of drought, combining panel household survey data with geospatial weather information. Using a conditional moment-based approach to estimate resilience probabilities, it highlights the interplay between gender, kinship norms, and climate shocks. Results show that Matrilineal-Matrilocal communities generally exhibit higher resilience, yet households with female land management in these areas are more vulnerable during droughts, underscoring how social norms and gendered access to resources mediate adaptive capacity. The second essay explores how households in Myanmar adjust their livelihoods under protracted and spatially heterogeneous conflict. Drawing on high-frequency phone survey data (2021–2023) merged with conflict event data, it applies a heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences estimator to trace the dynamic effects of conflict exposure. Findings reveal that intense violence leads to greater income concentration driven by the reduction in crop income, providing evidence against diversification as a viable coping mechanism during widespread systemic shocks. Overall, the results underscore the vulnerability of Myanmar’s agricultural sector to conflict. The third essay investigates the extent to which subjective poverty rankings, elicited from households, peers, and community leaders in Ethiopia, capture relative deprivation compared with conventional consumption- and wealth-based indicators. It finds that subjective rankings correlate more strongly with asset wealth than with consumption and that elite-based assessments exhibit the highest concordance. Importantly, subjective measures better capture relative welfare shifts among households exposed to shocks or welfare deterioration, suggesting their potential value for poverty targeting in data-scarce or shock-affected settings. Collectively, the three essays underscore that resilience and perceived well-being are inherently contextdependent, shaped by the interaction between shocks, social norms, and institutional and informational environments. They demonstrate that effective resilience-building and poverty reduction strategies must integrate economic, environmental, social, and cultural dimensions to account for the multifaceted nature of vulnerability and adaptive capacity in dynamic, high-risk contexts.