Following the 2008/9 financial crisis, China instituted a 4 trillion RMB stimulus package that was spent mostly on infrastructure, with a particular impact at local level. The goal was to sustain economic growth and preserve social stability. We use the Asian Barometer surveys from shortly before and after the stimulus to examine its impact on public trust in government, and find a reversal of ...

Temporary help services (THS) firms are increasing their hiring of disadvantaged individuals and claiming more subsidies for doing so. Do these subsidies—the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) and Welfare-to-Work Tax Credit (WtW)—create incentives that improve employment outcomes for THS workers? We examine the distinct effects of THS employment and WOTC/WtW subsidies using administrative and s...

We show theoretically that the poor can benefit from price changes induced by higher income inequality. As the number of poor in a society increases, or when the income difference between rich and poor increases, the market for products aimed towards the poor grows and such products become more profitable. As a result, there are circumstances where an increase in poverty associates with higher ...

Remittances and Well-Being among Rural-to-Urban Migrants in China The main objective of this paper is to propose a systematic approach to empirically analyse the effect of remittances on the utility of migrants, as proxied by their subjective well-being (SWB). Using data from a new survey on China (RUMiC), we estimate models in which a measure of subjective wellbeing is regressed on the level o...

The net impact of development interventions can depend on the availability of close substitutes to the intervention. We analyze a randomized trial of an innovative anti-poverty program in South India which provides “ultra-poor” households with inputs to create a new, sustainable livelihood. We find no statistically significant evidence of lasting net impact on consumption, income or asset accum...

Studying Justice: Measurement, Estimation, and Analysis of the Actual Reward and the Just Reward This paper describes procedures for measuring and estimating the fundamental quantities in the study of distributive justice. We examine a variety of methods for measuring the actual reward and the just reward, for both self and other, including direct and indirect methods for measuring the just rew...

Happiness and Domain Satisfaction: Theory and Evidence In the United States happiness, on average, varies positively with socio-economic status; is fairly constant over time; rises to midlife and then declines; and is lower among younger than older birth cohorts. These four patterns of mean happiness can be predicted rather closely from the mean satisfaction people report with each of four doma...

From the capability approach, child poverty is understood as the deprivation of basic capabilities and related achieved functionings. This paper examines multidimensional poverty among Afghan children using the Alkire and Foster method. The case of Afghanistan is particularly relevant as years of conflict aggravated by several severe droughts, political insecurity, bad governance and on going v...

A copula is best described, as in Joe (1997), as a multivariate distribution function that is used to bind each marginal distribution function to form the joint. The copula parameterises the dependence between the margins, while the parameters of each marginal distribution function can be estimated separately. This is a brief introduction to copulas and multivariate dependence issues within a h...

Th e present paper focuses on the role of domestic resource mobilization for fi nancing poverty reduction strategies. Policy makers should be aware of important macroeconomic trade-off s associated with MDG strategies fi nanced from tax increases or domestic borrowing. Th e trade-off s are largely intertemporal: can poor and middle-income countries absorb the initial fi nancing costs in order t...