This paper tests the efficiency of insurance markets in the Pakistan Punjab by examining how crop choices are affected by the presence of price and yield risk. We estimate reduced-form and structural models of crop choices. Although we cannot reject the hypothesis that village members efficiently share risk among themselves, production choices are shown to depend on risk. Existing risk sharing and selfinsurance mechanisms thus imperfectly protect Punjab farmers against village-level shocks. Results also indicate that households respond to consumption price risk, thereby suggesting that empirical and theoretical work on risk should avoid putting an exclusive emphasis on yield and output price risk

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This paper investigates the effects of weather risk on the offfarm labor supply of agricultural households in a developing country. Faced with the uninsurable risk of output and food price fluctuations, poor farmers in developing countries may diversify labor allocation across activities in order to smooth income in real terms. A key feature of this paper is that it distinguishes different types of offfarm labor markets: agriculture and nonagriculture on the one hand, and, wages paid in cash and wages paid in kind on the other. We develop a theoretical model of household optimization, which predicts that when farmers are faced with more production risk in their farm production, they find it more attractive to engage in nonagricultural work as a means of risk diversification, but the agricultural wage sector becomes more attractive when food security is an important issue for the farmers and agricultural wages are paid in kind. To test this prediction, we estimate a multivariate twolimit tobit model of labor allocation using household data from rural areas of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India. The regression results show that the share of the offfarm labor supply increases with weather risk, the increase is much larger in the case of nonagricultural work than in the case of agricultural wage work, and the increase is much larger in the case of agricultural wages paid in kind than in the cash wage case. Simulation results based on the regression estimates show that the sectoral difference is substantial, implying that empirical and theoretical studies on farmers' labor supply response to risk should distinguish between the types of offfarm work involved.JEL classification codes: Q12, O15, J22.

Members of the Japanese Society of Pediatric Pulmonology and the Japanese Society for Pediatric Infectious Diseases developed the Guidelines for the Management of Respiratory Infectious Diseases in Children with the objective of facilitating the appropriate diagnosis and treatment of childhood respiratory infections. To date, a first edition (2004) and a revised edition (2007) have been issued. Many problems complicate the diagnosis of the pathogens responsible for bronchopulmonary infections in children. The Guidelines were the first pediatric guidelines in the world to recommend treatment with antimicrobials suited to causative pathogens as identified from cultures of sputum and other clinical specimens collected from infection sites and satisfying assessment criteria. The major causative microorganisms for pneumonia in infants and children were revealed to be Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae and Mycoplasma pneumoniae. This manuscript describes the Guidelines for the Management of Respiratory Infectious Diseases in Children in Japan 2007, with a focus on pneumonia.