zones, there is no dry season and only one of these two zones has a period with high rainfall. Therefore, in consideration of the fact that there are two cropping seasons for rice and that the FIES captures income and expenditures over the whole year, we choose to simply examine the impact of rainfall deviations from the normal amount of rainfall in the year before the survey.<sup>8</sup> Thus the initial measure of the rainfall shock is the deviation of average monthly rainfall in a given year from the mean of average monthly rainfall over 1977-2001.<sup>9</sup> Details of data construction are in appendix B. Figure 4 shows the distribution of rainfall shocks in 2002, 2005, 2008, the years before the FIES surveys. The distribution of rainfall varies sizably across the three waves. In particular, 2008 is a year with high rainfall; the median is 34.6 mm, versus -4.5 mm in 2005 and-6.7 mm in 2002. The mean is also much higher in 2008, at 45.8 mm while it is only 3.4 mm and 2.8 mm in 2005 and 2002 respectively. While the medians and the means for 2002 and 2005 are close, the standard deviation is higher in 2005, at 33.8 against 30.9 in 2002. We can see in the figure that the range of values is wider than in 2002.

# Figure 4 here

Our analysis is focused on rural _barangays_ . A _barangay_ is tagged urban if it satisfies any of the following criteria: (i) part of a chartered city or provincial capital with a population density of at least 1,000 persons per square kilometer; (ii) _poblaciones_ or central districts of a municipality or city with a population density of at least 500 persons per square kilometer; (iii) there is presence of the following: (a) street pattern or network of streets in either parallel or right angle orientation; (b) at least six economic establishments ; or (c) (commercial banks, manufacturing, recreational, and/or personal services); or (d) at least three social/public establishments (town hall, church, public plaza, park, cemetery, school, hospital, health center, library, market place, or building where trading activities are carried on at least once a week); and (iv) having at least 1,000 residents with occupations predominantly not in farming or fishing.<sup>10</sup>

**Sampling.** The total sample is 118,832 households. Focusing on rural areas, we have a sample of 65,956 households. In each round the sample is stratified by PSUs that have a probability of selection very close to 1.

> 8 In spite of requests, we were unable to obtain the data collected by visit in each year of the FIES survey. This would have allowed us to have a better match between the timing of the rainfall during the year and the date of collection of the household consumption data.

> 9 We take average and not total because in 60% of the municipalities, there is at least one month with missing data. Almost half of these, 17%, have only one month with missing data. When taking the average, the denominator is the number of months with non-missing data. This allows not smoothing differences between municipalities due to the availability of data.

> 10 The “URB” variable in all three rounds of the FIES (2003, 2006 and 2009) is based on the 2000 urban classification. This classification is updated every time a new barangay census is made available. For our purpose, we held the classification constant for a more consistent comparison across time periods.

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