| Using a two-year panel of 1,422 Kenyan households surveyed in 1997 and 2000, we measure how primeage adult mortality affects rural households’ size and composition, agricultural production, asset levels, and off-farm income. First, the paper uses adult mortality rates from available data on an HIV-negative sample from neighboring Tanzania to predict the number of deaths that might have been expected in the absence of HIV, and compares this to the number of deaths actually recorded over the survey interval in the Kenyan sample. Based on this procedure, only a quarter of the prime-age female deaths in the 25-34 age range and about half of the male deaths in the 35-44 year age range age range could have been predicted on the basis of the HIV-negative... |
