randomly selected from a list stratified by poverty category—poorest, poor, not-so-poor, and not poor—as determined through a survey- and community-based "participatory identification of the poor" exercise conducted in 2001. We exploit this categorization to disaggregate effects by poverty category, after correcting for the oversampling of the poorest and undersampling of the not-so-poor implied by the survey design (Table 2).<sup>5</sup>

**<u>Table 2: Sample distribution by poverty category</u>**

|**_Poverty category_**|**_Observations_**|**_Sample shares_**|**_Weighted shares_**|
|---|---|---|---|
|Poorest|1,649|39|21|
|Poor|1,313|31|34|
|Not sopoor|936|22|33|
|Notpoor|361|8|12|
||4,259|100|100|

The survey questionnaire, which was nearly identical in the two rounds, covered various outcome indictors, including expenditures on food and non-food items, assets (from consumer durables to farm and non-farm assets), land owned and operated, savings and loans, educational status, health status, household decision-making, autonomy, political participation. The data are of reasonably good quality.<sup>6</sup> Sample means of key outcome indicators reveal sizable increases, which is not surprising given that the period 2004-2008 was one of rapid growth in AP (Table 3).

**<u>Table 3: Sample means of key outcome indicators (2004 Rs.)</u>**

||_2004_|_2008_|_Difference_|_Incrp.y. _|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Total monthly per capita expenditures|571|916|345|12.5%|
|Food monthly pc expenditures|310|401|91|6.6%|
|Non-food monthly pc expenditures|123|173|50|9.0%|
|Health monthly pc expenditures|56|109|53|18.1%|
|Education monthly pc expenditures|18|57|39|33.4%|
|Total savings|5290|13026|7736|25.3%|
|Loans taken by HH over last two years|9653|20630|10977|20.9%|
|Value of land owned|27083|156951|129868|55.2%|
|Value of livestock|5332|8005|2673|10.7%|
|Value of durable assets|2633|5446|2813|19.9%|

Note: all monetary values are deflated to 2004, with average inflation taken to be about 4.2 percent per year.

of 480 villages (only 11 blocks were covered in one district, but more villages were selected so as to have the same number of villages in each of the five districts). More details can be found in Galab and Reddy (2010).

5 The poorest of the poor were defined as those who could eat only when they got work and lacked shelter, proper clothing, social respect, and means to send their children to school; the poor as those having no land, living on daily wages, and needing to send school-age children to work in times of crisis. The ‘not-so-poor’ were defined as having some land, proper shelter, sending their children to public schools, being recognized in society, and having access to bank credit as well as public services. Those having more than 5 acres of land, no problem to obtain food, shelter, and clothing, hiring laborers, sending children to private schools, using private hospitals, lending rather than borrowing money, and having considerable social status were defined as non-poor (see Deininger and Liu (2013)). Weights were constructed using block-level data from the participatory identification of the poor (PIP) exercise, as the village listing forms or PIP details are no longer available.

6 Questionnaires for 2008 were rechecked in the field for a small sample of households and found to be accurate. At the analysis stage, we checked some common indicators of data problems, such as the number of household members or of food items consumed tapering off during fieldwork (to reduce workload), and did not find evidence of these issues. We also randomly checked household composition (number of members, gender, age, relationship to head) for the same household across surveys and found the data to be reasonably consistent.

5