Households in developing countries use a variety of mechanisms to cope with shocks, such as selling assets, accessing capital markets, reallocating labor, and receiving private or public transfers. Among these responses, selling assets is often a last resort because irreversible asset losses may put the household at risk of future poverty. This policy note summarizes research focusing on the extent to which various kinds of adverse events (that is, shocks) affect men’s and women’s behavior in relation to asset accumulation and divestiture and whether the different types of shocks result in men’s and women’s changing their stock of assets in different ways.