Understanding the role of foreign aid in poverty alleviation is one of the central inquiries for development economics. To augment past crosscountry studies and randomized evaluations, this project estimates the first sub-national model of foreign aid allocation and impact. Newly geocoded aid project data from Malawi is used in combination with multiple rounds of living standards data to predic...

Are Lone Mothers Responsive to Policy Changes? Evidence from a Workfare Reform in a Generous Welfare State There is a heated debate in many European countries about a move towards a welfare system that increases the incentives for lone mothers to move off welfare and into work. We analyze the consequences of a major Norwegian workfare reform of the generous welfare system for lone mothers. Our ...

Is the cost of living higher for the poor? Recent studies based on unit values (the ratio of expenditure to quantity) suggest that poor households pay substantially higher prices because liquidity constraints force them to purchase goods in small quantities and not realize bulk discounts. Unit values are subject to several biases and reflect economizing choices made by households, so they may n...

Applied economists are often interested in studying trends in important economic indicators, such as inequality or poverty, but comparisons over time can be made impossible by changes in data collection methodology. We describe an easily implemented procedure, based on inverse probability weighting, that allows to recover comparability of estimated parameters identified implicitly by a moment c...

This is an ambitious attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap. The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household survey for 2002, designed with research hypotheses in mind. Enrolment is high in rural China by comparison with most poor rural societies, but the quality of education varies gr...

We investigate if participation in Indian Self Help Group microfinance program (SHG) results in reducing vulnerability. Using theSHG rural household survey data collected in 2003, we examine the poverty and vulnerability profiles of SHG and non-SHG rural, low-income household members. Our construction of the vulnerability is based on a methodology that allows for the estimation of household vul...

One major limitation to addressing child undernutrition is a lack of the information required to target resources. This article extends the small-area estimation technique of Elbers, Lanjouw, and Lanjouw (2002, 2003) to jointly estimate multiple equations while allowing for individual-specific random errors across equations (in addition to clusterand household-specific random errors). Estimates...

The m ain objective of the present paper is to present a cross-country analysis of pro-poor grow th in 80 countries in 237 grow th spells during the period 1984-2001. To achieve this objective, the paper proposes a new m easure of pro-poor grow th that captures gains and losses of grow th rates due to changes in the distribution of consum ption. The gains im ply propoor grow th, w hile the loss...

Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress Progress in closing differences in many objective outcomes for blacks relative to whites has slowed, and even worsened, over the past three decades. However, over this period the racial gap in well-being has shrunk. In the early 1970s data revealed much lower levels of subjective well-being among blacks relative to whites. Investigating var...

Understanding whether the gap between rich and poor country’s GDP per capita has narrowed is really about the changing shapes of distributions of wellbeing and technology indicators. As limiting cases, convergence between rich and poor country groups can be brought about by countries within groups becoming less alike without any diminution of growth rate differentials between them, or it can be...