The authors develop a microeconometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, they also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for conditional distributions of education, fertility,...

This paper presents an original method to study individual earning dynamics using repeated cross-sectional data. Because panel data of individuals are seldom available in developing countries, it is difficult to study individual earning dynamics and related issues such as the propensity of...

Development is about fundamental change in economic structures, about the movement of resources out of agriculture to services and industry, about migration to cities and international movement of labor, and about transformation in trade and technology. Social inclusion and change-change in...

This volume presents a collection of studies on the dynamics of income inequality based on micro data. Using a simple but powerful empirical methodology, the authors analyze the roles of prices, occupational choice, and educational choice in accounting for household income and its contribution...

In many developing countries, achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 will require significant increases in expenditures on social services and in foreign assistance. It will also require careful planning of the sector allocation and sequencing of public spending. Especially...

This paper develops a method to decompose differences across distributions of household income, based on counterfactual distributions that 'lie between' the actually observed distributions. Our approach decomposes differences between any two income distributions (or functionals such as...

A growing number of developing economies are providing cash transfers to poor people that require certain behaviors on their part, such as attending school or regularly visiting health care facilities. A simple ex ante methodology is proposed for evaluating such programs and used to assess the...

Drawing on a comprehensive compilation of quantile shares and inequality measures for 34 countries, including over 5,600 estimated Gini coefficient, we review the measurement of income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last seven decades. Although the evidence from the first...