Using cross country regressions, this paper constructs a novel distance-to-frontier metric for tracking broad socio-economic inequality (including access of the poor to health infrastructure) over time for individual countries. Given the unavailability of reliable and consistent direct measures of inequality for most poor countries, especially related to nonincome aspects of living standards, t...

The Marginal Income Effect of Education on Happiness: Estimating the Direct and Indirect Effects of Compulsory Schooling on Well-Being in Australia Many economists and educators favour public support for education on the premise that education improves the overall well-being of citizens. However, little is known about the causal pathways through which education shapes people’s subjective well-b...

A number of recent papers have found evidence of interdependencies in utility functions, in that, ceteris paribus, individual well-being falls as others' income or consumption increases. This paper asks if, in addition, the distribution of income in the reference group matters. I consider full-time employees in eleven waves of British panel data, and take life satisfaction and the GHQ-12 as mea...

This paper investigates potential measurement error biases in poverty transition matrices. We compare transition matrices based on survey consumption data to measurement-error-free simulated consumption, which is built on initial conditions and parameters estimated from a basic consumption dynamics model allowing for measurement error. We …nd that measurement error in consumption data magni…es ...

Using panel data spanning 15 years, this paper investigates the persistence and correlates of subjective and consumption poverty in urban Ethiopia. Despite the decline in consumption poverty in recent years, which has been linked to rapid economic growth, subjective poverty has remained largely unchanged. Dynamic probit regression results show that households with a history of past poverty cont...

This paper presents a non-parametric microsimulation methodology for assessing the determinants of changes in income inequality and poverty. One great advantage of this method over alternatives is that it is not very demanding in terms of modelling labour supply and household behaviour while still providing a plausible link between changes in overall labour market conditions and the full househ...

PurposeWe respond to some challenges in the transition to Sustainable Development Goals by examining the correlations between mobile and inclusive development (quality of growth, poverty and inequality) in 93 developing countries for the year 2011. Design/methodology/approachMobile money service entails: ‘mobile used to pay bills’ and ‘mobile used to receive/send money’. Interactive Ordinary Le...

This paper examines whether and how socio-economic status is associated with children’s behavioural development in today’s children. Using a large cohort of English children born in the early 1990s we find significant social inequalities in several dimensions of child behaviour at age 7. We examine whether these inequalities are associated with characteristics of the child’s early home environm...

To provide keyword-based access to a large text file it is usually necessary to invert the file and create an inverted index that storeso for each word in the file, the paragraph or sentence numbers in which that word occurs. Inverting alarge file using traditional techniques may take as much temporary disk space as is occupied by the file itself, and consume a great deal of cpu time. Here we d...

Multidimensional Poverty Analysis: Looking for a Middle Ground * Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes three methodological alternatives to the false dichotomy between sc...