Household surveys play a pivotal role in empirical economics. Cross-section and longitudinal surveys are regularly conducted throughout the globe. A description of survey design and sampling methods provides the foundation for discussing survey errors. These include errors associated with sampling, survey coverage and non response (which includes attrition from panel surveys) as well as errors of observation or measurement. In recent years, surveys have tended to become more complex and broader in scope with many reaching beyond measuring economic choices, constraints and outcomes. This trend will likely continue and exciting technological innovations in survey methods and implementation promise to revolutionize the field.

This paper uses data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to examine the relationship between six dimensions of nutritional status and household resources paying special attention to the distinction between longer-run resources and short-run fluctuations in resources. Between 1996 and 1998, Russia experienced a dramatic decline in economic activity which was followed by an equally dramatic rise between 1998 and 2000. We exploit this fact in combination with the panel nature of RLMS to measure the effect of changes in household resources on nutritional status. Nutritional status appears to be very resilient to variation in household resources. Gross energy intake, adult body mass index (BMI), and child stature all change very little as expenditure deviates from its long-run average. In contrast, we find a positive, significant and substantively large effect of longer-run resources on energy intake, two indicators of diet quality, adult body mass index (BMI), and child stature. It appears that individuals and households are able to weather large economic crises at least in terms of maintaining body mass and energy intake.

In recent years, significant advances have been made in better understanding the complex relationships between health and development. This reflects the combined effects of methodological innovations at both the theoretical and empirical level, the integration of insights from the biological and health sciences into economic analyses as well as improvements in the quantity and quality of data on population health and socio-economic status. To provide a foundation for discussing these advances, we describe static and dynamic models of the evolution of health over the life course in conjunction with the inter-relationships between health, other human capital outcomes and economic prosperity. Facts about health and development at both the aggregate and individual levels are presented along with a discussion of the importance of measurement. We proceed to review the empirical literature with a goal of highlighting emerging lines of scientific inquiry that are likely to have an important impact on the field. We begin with recent work that relates health events in early life, including in utero, to health, human capital and economic success in later life. We then turn to adult health and its relationship with socio-economic success,exploring the impact of health on economic outcomes and vice-versa as well as the links between health and consumption smoothing. Recent evidence from the empirical literature on the micro-level impacts of HIV/AIDS on development is summarized. We conclude that developments on the horizon suggest a very exciting future for scientific research in this area.

The positive correlation between health and economic prosperity has been widely documented. The extent to which this reflects a causal effect of health on economic outcomes is very controversial. Two classes of evidence are examined. Carefully designed random assignment laboratory and field studies provide compelling evidence that nutrient deficiency -- particularly iron -- reduces work capacity and, in some cases, work output. Confidence in these results is bolstered by a good understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms. Some random assignment studies indicate improved health services yield returns in the labor market. Observational studies suggest that general dimensions of nutritional status, such as height and body mass index, are significant predictors of economic success although their interpretation is confounded because they reflect influences of early childhood investments and family background. Energy intake and possibly diet quality have also been found to be predictive of economic success in observational studies. However, identification of causal pathways in observational studies is difficult and involves statistical assumptions about unobserved heterogeneity that are difficult to test. Illustrations using survey data demonstrate the practical importance of this concern. Furthermore, failure to take into account the dynamic interplay between changes in health and economic status has limited progress in this literature. Broadening random assignment studies to measure effects of an intervention on economic prosperity, investing in population-based longitudinal socio-economic surveys, and exploiting emerging technologies to better measure health in those surveys will yield very high returns in developing a better understanding of how health influence economic prosperity.

In the early 1990s, the South African Old Age Pension was expanded to cover most black South Africans above a gender-specific age cut-off. This expansion resulted in a substantial and arguably exogenous increase in the income of older South Africans. A series of very creative studies have exploited this source of variation in income to shed light on the ways in which familes and households allocate resources among their members. A key assumption underlying these studies is that pension income has no impact on unmeasured characteristics of those people who co-reside with pension recipients. This paper provides empirical evidence on the importance of this assumption. Pensioneligible adults are more likely to co-reside with other adults who have lower levels of human capital as measured by height and education. Since height and education are fixed for adults, this cannot be an effect of the pension income but rather reflects the selection of adults who co-reside with older adults when they become eligible for the pension. The paper proceeds to explore the importance of treating living arrangements as endogenous for re- interpretation of results on the impact of the pension in the literature. The evidence highlights the potential value of moving beyond theory and data which are bound by the confines of a spatially determined definition of the household.

Recent research on household behavior suggests that, ceteris paribus, a woman’s "power" within a household influences consumption and time allocation choices. From an empirical point of view, a central stumbling block in this line of inquiry has been identification of sources of "power" that can plausibly be treated as exogenous. Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC, was paid only to single women with children. The benefit level provides a natural fall-back for a low-income woman with children who is contemplating separation from her partner. As AFDC payments increase, separation will become more attractive and, we conjecture, the relative bargaining power of the woman in a household should also increase. If this is true, and if bargaining power does affect allocation decisions within the household, then the AFDC benefit level should affect household choices in intact families. This hypothesis is tested using the PSID from 1968 through 1992. Benefit levels, which (conditional on family size) vary across states and over time are treated as exogenous. In order to sweep out household-specific unobserved heterogeneity, models include household fixed effects. In addition, the model predicts the behavior of households with young children should be influenced by AFDC but not that of households with no children. Second, AFDC is unlikely to be paid to women in higher income households and so it should have a bigger influence on the behavior of lower income households. The results are consistent with these predictions. AFDC generosity does affect the allocation of resources in households with young children, and particularly lower income households with very young children. Corroborating evidence is drawn from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We conclude that options outside marriage, as indicated by the generosity of AFDC benefits, affect bargaining power of women within marriage which, in turn, influences household resource allocation decisions.

Matched retrospective life history data collected from the same individuals in two waves of the Malaysian Family Life Survey provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the quality of long term recall data in a rapidly changing developing country. Recall quality, measured by consistency of incidence and dating of moves reported twelve years apart, is higher among the better educated. Respondents better remember more salient moves, those linked with other important life events such as marriage, childbirth or a job change and moves that lasted a long time. Migrations that dim in memory as time passes are typically shorter duration or local moves, often made while the respondent was young. Dating of moves is also significantly improved when linked with other salient events. Our findings suggest concrete and practical steps that can be followed to improve the quality of retrospective life histories collected in field surveys.

This paper examines whether a woman's power relative to her husband's affects decisions about use of prenatal and delivery care in Indonesia. Measures of power that span economic and social domains are considered. Holding household resources constant, control over "economic" resources by a woman affects the couple’s decision-making. Relative to a woman with no assets that she perceives as being her own, a woman with some share of household assets influences reproductive health decisions. Evidence suggests these decisions also vary if a woman is better educated than her husband, comes from a higher social status background than her husband, or if her father is better educated than her father-in-law. We conclude that both economic and social dimensions of the distribution of power between spouses influence decision-making and that it is useful to conceptualize power as multi-dimensional in understanding the behavior of couples.