Inclusion of means testing into age pension programs allows governments to better direct benefits to those most in need and to control funding costs by providing flexibility to control the participation rate (extensive margin) and the benefit level (intensive margin). The former is aimed at...

An important criterion for the design of urban water prices is the affordability of water supply for poor customers. This paper presents a typology of water pricing options which policy-makers have at their disposal in order to address affordability. A review of theoretical insights and...

Affordability of water services is a pressing water policy issue for both the developed and in particular the developing world. Despite its well-known theoretical shortcomings affordability analysis for water supply is up to now widely based on the ratio of a household's water expenditure and...

We analytically show that a common across rich/poor individuals Stone-Geary utility function with subsistence consumption in the context of a simple two-asset portfolio-choice model is capable of qualitatively and quantitatively explaining: (i) the higher saving rates of the rich, (ii) the...

Roughly a little under half of the world's population is mired in poverty, most in the developing world--about 3 billion people constitute the global base of the economic pyramid. Building on earlier work by Banerjee and Duflo (2007), this paper uses survey data from three countries in order to...