December-February, monsoon takes the value 1 for June-September, and autumn takes the value 1 for October-November, and 0 otherwise.

Access to credit is identified with the loan indicator variable that takes the value 1 if the household had taken any loans in the last 12 months from family, friends, micro-finance institutions, banks, or other sources. The safety net indicator variable takes the value 1 if at least one member of the household benefited from one of the safety net programs (See Table A2 in annex tables) and 0 otherwise.

The access to market index measures how easily people can reach markets; it is the sum of the population of the markets in the vicinity of a location inversely weighted by the travel time along the transportation network to these markets (Blankespoor and Yoshida, 2010). The index was calculated with the negative exponential potential accessibility model for 202 markets with populations ranging from approximately 15,000 to 6,500,000 (Dhaka) and aggregated at the Upazila level. The access to market index is a continuous variable that takes values between 0 and 1. **Map 2** shows the access to market index for various Upazilas in Bangladesh. The construction of local rainfall variability, and historically flood prone areas are described in detail below.

We control for other factors such as household age-group composition with three variables, number of females in the household ten years or older, number of males in the household ten years or older, and number of dependents. We include the number of household members between 10 and 65 engaged in agriculture in some of the specifications. Household level education is measured by the share of literates in the household (See Table A1 for a complete list of variables and their descriptive statistics).

We use a household wealth proxy with land ownership and livestock indicator variables. Land ownership takes the value 1 if the household owns more than the average land in the survey and 0 otherwise. The average land is the mean of land owned by the households that own land. Livestock indicator takes the value 1 if the household owns any livestock and 0 otherwise. Access to electricity and cell or land-line phones are used as measures of a proxy for access to infrastructure and communication. The Upazila population is expected to proxy for economic development.

# **_Rainfall variability_**

We considered two sources of rainfall data. First, historical monthly rainfall data from 1948 to 2010 was from the Meteorological Department of Bangladesh for 35 weather stations around the country. The weather station data represents actual measured rainfall at the specific station and time and thus, are more accurate. On the other hand, substantial manipulation is needed to estimate rainfall at each Upazila from the weather station data. We used inverse distance weighted average of three nearest stations to estimate the rainfall for each Upazila for each month. However, this method does not control for altitude and other geographical characteristics and Upazilas near international boundaries do not take weather stations in other countries that may be closer than those in Bangladesh into account.

The second source of rainfall data is from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Estimated monthly rainfall for most of the world is available by the half degree resolution from 1902 to 2009. The CRU estimation combines weather station data with other information to arrive at the estimates. Previous versions of the CRU data were homogenized to reduce variability and provide more 6