_Note_ : Table compares types of observed poverty in 2010 and 2013. Estimates account for complex survey design, and are expressed in percentage terms.

Table 2 provides descriptive statistics for our variables of interest for Malawi as a whole, as well as the Northern, Central and Southern regions. The ranking of regions in terms of poverty differs if we use consumption versus income per capita. In terms of consumption per capita, Central has the highest consumption figures, followed by Southern, with Northern quite a bit lower. Income per capita is also highest in Central, but then followed by Northern and then Southern. The pattern for maize harvest per capita follows income per capita, with the highest amounts in Central followed by Northern. Households in Southern obtain approximately half the amount of maize harvest per capita as Central. Households’ cropland holdings dedicated to maize production are also much lower in Southern, at .69 hectares on average, versus 1.34 and 1.38 in Northern and Central, respectively.

# **_Shocks_**

The precarious material conditions of most rural households in Malawi are compounded by their high exposure to rainfall, price, health and off‐farm employment shocks. To capture the effect of rainfall shocks, we use the absolute value of the percent difference between flowering season<sup>5</sup> rainfall in 2012/2013 and the long‐term mean during the flowering season. Historical rainfall data were obtained from the ARC2 database of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The absolute value is used since values far from the mean in either direction are expected to correlate with worse welfare outcomes. For maize price shocks, we had to rely on a shorter time period, 2005 – 2013, using administrative data on monthly maize prices observed in 72 markets across the country. We use deviations in 2012 from the mean price during the lean season January‐March, since this is the period prior to the harvest when households are most likely to need to purchase maize. We consider 2012 price shocks since we expect previous season prices to have an effect on producer decision‐making and well‐ being outcomes in 2013 without being caused by the weather shocks observed for 2013. Unlike rainfall, where very high and very low realizations are of interest due to their negative effects on well‐being, we construct the price shock as the difference in maize prices from the 9‐year average where those prices are higher, and set the shock to zero otherwise. Thus, we are capturing the consumer price shock in the lean season of 2012, which we expect to reduce consumption, and possibly income (Ecker & Qaim, 2011; Kaminski, Christiaensen, & Gilbert, 2014).

For health and off‐farm employment shocks, we relied on the spatial variation found in the IHPS survey responses. We proxy for illness shocks in the household by including a dummy for whether a household member had malaria in the two weeks prior to the interview. Perennial malaria transmission is intense in Malawi (Roca‐Feltrer, et al., 2012; WHO, 2014), and can have substantial effects on productivity and income (Gollin & Zimmermann, 2007; Asenso‐Okyere, Asante, Tarekegn, & Andam, 2009). The household economic impact we consider is whether the household received income from any off‐farm formal or informal employment (wages, ganyu, or self‐employment) in 2010 and lost access to that income in 2013. This loss of access to off‐farm income is included as a shock since off‐farm employment represents diversification of income, which is expected to contribute to a households’ ability to smooth consumption in periods when other sources of income are constrained (Morduch, 1995).

> 5 Flowering season refers to December and the following January. Although the start and end of the rainy season and thus the flowering season vary from year to year, December and January are traditionally the months when maize and other crops have been established.

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