Given the aging of the population, policies relating to the design and reform of public pension programs are prominent in policy debates. For many developing countries, a major concern centers around the possible displacement of traditional family-based support by public programs. One challenge...

Private tutoring in South Korea is quite pervasive. In 2006, the household sector spent 2.57% of the nation's GDP on private tutoring for primary and secondary school students. Government spending on those students was about 3.5% of GDP, which is about the average level among OECD countries....

Interest-free loans are a common feature of low-income rural economies. In much of the economics literature, lending at zero and positive interest are viewed as being highly segmented in the community, with interest-free loans an essential component of long-term mutual consumption agreements...

This study explores the nature of the male marital earnings premium in the context of a developing country in which the payment of bride wealth is practiced. We use data from the South African Labor Force Survey of September 2004 and the Labor Force Survey Panel (2001-4), the first national...

A fundamental premise of absolute poverty lines is that they represent the same level of utility through time and space. Disturbingly, a series of recent studies in middle- and low-income economies show that even carefully derived poverty lines rarely satisfy this premise. This article proposes...

We compare nonexperimental impact estimates based on matching methods with those from a randomized evaluation to determine whether the nonexperimental approach can "match" the so-called gold standard. The social experiment we use was carried out to evaluate a geographically targeted conditional...

HIV/AIDS threatens to overstretch the already frail informal safety nets in countries heavily affected by the epidemic, potentially making it difficult for households with HIV-positive members to keep up appropriate consumption levels when experiencing shocks. These households may, in addition,...

<label>Abstract:</label>Using a novel data set from a developing country, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), I analyze an emigration flow to the United States that has no legal barriers to entry and contains detailed information on the immigrant at home and in the United States. I find that highly...

The paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer program implemented in rural areas in Colombia since 2002, on school enrollment and child labor. Using a difference-in-difference framework, our results show that the program increased school participation of...

Using the nationally representative Urban Household Income and Expenditure Survey (UHIES) conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of China, we document a steadily rising trend in income and consumption inequality during the period from 1992 to 2003 in urban China. Despite the rising...