Three essays on poverty measurement and risk protection

This dissertation contains four chapters related to the measure of poverty and risk protection against health shocks. The first chapter is a preface describing the importance of the topic and how each chapter relates to each other. The second chapter applies a method to find poverty traps estimating the asset dynamics in urban areas in Colombia. The findings show that under this theoretical framework there is not a poverty trap in urban areas in Colombia. The third chapter improves on the poverty measurement used in chapter two proposing a new method to estimate poverty traps, complementing it with the analysis of income shocks and creating a new poverty measure in the process. The third chapter makes visible the importance of income shocks when modelling income, and in particular poverty. Therefore, chapter four focuses on measuring how well Colombian households are shielded against health shocks that may end up hurting the household capacity to accumulate productive assets and to generate income.