Recent National Sample Surveys point to significant poverty reduction in India since 2004/05, with a marked acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. This paper enquires into important aspects of income mobility between 2004/05 and 2011/12, based on new statistical methods to convert the three...

This paper analyzes the Indian National Sample Survey data spanning 1987/88-2011/12 to uncover patterns of transition into and out of different classes of the consumption distribution. At the aggregate level, income growth has accelerated, accompanied by accelerating poverty decline. Underlying...

There is an increasingly stronger demand for more frequent and accurate poverty estimates, despite the oftentimes unavailable household consumption data. This paper offers a review of alternative imputation methods that have been employed to provide poverty estimates in such contexts. These...

Survey data on household consumption are often unavailable or incomparable over time in many low- and middle-income countries. Based on a unique randomized survey experiment implemented in Tanzania, this study offers new and rigorous evidence demonstrating that survey-to-survey imputation can...

Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper, the authors build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data...

Panel data conventionally underpin the analysis of poverty mobility over time. However, such data are not readily available for most developing countries. Far more common are the "snap-shots" of welfare captured by cross-section surveys. This paper proposes a method to construct synthetic panel...

The barriers faced by Chinese rural-urban migrants to access social services, particularly education, in host cities could help explain why the majority of them choose to leave their children behind. We identified the causal impacts of school fees by instrumenting for it with unexpected shocks...

Very few studies have examined the impacts of both climate change and air pollution on student education outcomes, particularly in a developing country setting. Analyzing a rich database consisting of household and school surveys, test scores, and temperature and air pollution data over the past...

This paper investigates a women's self-help group program with more than 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest rural areas of Northern India. The program has four streams of activity in micro-savings, agricultural enterprise training, health and nutrition education, and political...

The increasing growth of forced displacement worldwide has led to the stronger interest of various stakeholders in measuring poverty among refugee populations. However, refugee data remain scarce, particularly in relation to the measurement of income, consumption, or expenditure. This paper...