States—see the discussion of Dehejia and Lleras Muney (2004) above. However, the magnitude of the coefficients reported by Miller and Urdinola is very large, perhaps implausibly so.<sup>28</sup> We turn next to evidence from developing countries outside Latin America. Stillman and Thomas (2004) analyze the impact of an economic contraction in Russia in 1998 on household expenditures on food, food intake, and measures of nutritional status—including Body Mass Index (BMI) for adults, and height-for-age and weight-for-height for children. The 1998 crisis analyzed by Stillman and Thomas was particularly deep, involving a 30 percent contraction in GDP in the last two quarters of 1998, and an 18 percent decrease in per capita expenditures; however, the recovery was also quick—by 2000, income levels were back to their pre-crisis levels.

Stillman and Thomas (2004) use a rich data set that includes measures of expenditures as well as nutrient intake, as reported by households for 24-hour recall periods. They show that total _expenditures_ on food dropped sharply during the crisis. When they consider the impact of the crisis on the _quantities_ of various foodstuffs consumed, however, the results are more nuanced. For starches, meats, and dairy products, the crisis did not result in a decrease in the quantity consumed—rather, it seems, households switched from more expensive to less expensive sources of calories within these food categories. Only in the case of consumption of fruits and vegetables is there clear evidence of a sharp decrease during the crisis, and of a rebound thereafter. Despite this resilience in total caloric intake, however, there is some evidence of a deterioration in the nutritional status for children—estimates of the effect of the transitory shock to income on the weight-for-height z-score suggest a decline of about 0.11 points. On the other hand, there is no evidence of a deterioration in height-for-age, a more long-run measure of child nutritional status.

A variety of authors have studied the impact of the 1998 crisis in Indonesia on child health and nutrition, with mixed results. Strauss et al. (2004) show that there is no evidence that weight-for-height, height-for-age, or blood hemoglobin levels were negatively affected by the

> 28 The infant mortality rate in Colombia in 1980 was approximately 37 per thousand children born (World Bank, 2008). In the main table of results in Miller and Urdinola (Table 2), the authors report the effects of the three pricechange events they study, at the median coffee-growing intensity and for a 500 peso price change. These imply a change in cohort size of between 0.40 and 2.89 percent or, equivalently, between 4 and 29 fewer (more) cohort members per 1000 people born. This, in and of itself, is very large—for the larger estimate, it represents substantially more than half of infant mortality in Colombia in 1980. However, both the Brazilian frost and the Brazilian drought resulted in price increases of about 1,250 pesos. Taking the parameter estimates in Table 2 in their paper at face value, and focusing on the Brazilian drought, this would mean decreases in infant mortality of between 40 per thousand and 70 per thousand for the median county in Colombia.

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