We will begin the class by defining development, poverty, and inequality and looking at some general trends in these measures. We will move on to look at human capital within which we will cover health and nutrition, education, and population and fertility. After the midterm we will study corruption and social capital. We will then study intra-household sharing and inequality within households. After that we will look at risk coping mechanisms including traditional credit, microcredit, roscas, and microinsurance. We will end with a look at land and property rights.

Many of the papers we will read in this course will be empirical and one of the goals of this class will be to learn how to read, understand, and criticize empirical work. You do not need to have taken an econometrics course since we will cover the necessary tools in class.