Improved rural connectivity can lower trade costs while reshaping rural food environments. This paper combines Nepal survey rounds from 2013, 2014, and 2016 with a harmonized measure of local-to-regional food-market connectivity. Rather than using historical OpenStreetMap snapshots as a road history, the measure uses 2016 OSM to provide a common road geometry and official road records to determine the historical availability of strategic links, while holding each ward’s local access point and baseline food-market destination fixed. A 10 percent improvement in connectivity is associated with about a 0.6 percentage-point increase in the stable processed/convenience-food budget share and a 0.07-point decline in child dietary diversity. Point estimates are similar across ward and household fixed-effects models for food purchasing and across repeated-cross-section and within-child models for dietary diversity, although restricted wild-cluster inference is less precise, particularly for purchasing outcomes. Estimated changes in total food expenditure are small, and producer-side estimates show little consistent short-run adjustment. The findings suggest that market integration may reshape rural food demand and need not coincide with improvements in child dietary diversity.

Local soil conditions can affect child nutrition through agricultural productivity, household resources and food prices, and the nutrient composition of foods. This paper links georeferenced Demographic and Health Survey data for 180,177 children in 31 Sub-Saharan African countries to high-resolution Africa Soil Information Service nutrient maps. Twelve soil chemical measures are summarized by their first principal component and standardized within country. The preferred specification compares children within country-specific 1 geographic cells and conditions on child demographics and household socioeconomic characteristics. A one-standard-deviation increase in the soil nutrient component is associated with 0.055 standard deviations higher height-for-age and a 1.11-percentage-point reduction in the probability of stunting. The preferred association is stable across alternative spatial fixed effects, agroecological controls, and constructions of the soil component, while spatial first-difference estimates retain the same sign but are substantially less precise and less stable in magnitude. Weight-for-age also increases withthe component, but the evidence does not isolate a single mineral or transmission channel. Taken together, the results are consistent with a causal contribution of local soil environments to child growth, but the observational design does not identify the magnitude of that contribution..

How much households spend after an adverse shock may conceal substantial adjustment in what they buy. We study food-expenditure responses to monsoon rainfall shocks in rural Nepal using three rounds of household panel data and locally standardized CHIRPS rainfall anomalies. Same-household first differences across 2013–2014 and 2014–2016 show that drier prior monsoons produce little systematic change in reported total common-food expenditure but shift expenditure away from processed and convenience foods and toward staples. The processed-food response replicates across two rainfall measures and both panel transitions and remains robust to balanced-panel restrictions, leave-one-ward-out exercises, Conley spatial covariance estimates, and inference clustered by identical rainfall histories. Annual purchasing data show higher expenditure on purchased staples and lower expenditure on processed foods across all four design cells, while production responses are more heterogeneous. Together, these patterns point to a broader adjustment process rather than a uniform own-production replacement channel. Overall, aggregate food expenditure can appear relatively smooth even when households materially reallocate the food budget.