It is well known in theory that certain forms of non-linear dynamics in household incomes can yield poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth. The potential implications for policy are dramatic: effective social protection from transient poverty will be an investment with lasting benefits,...

Are the determinants of chronic and transient poverty different? Do policies that reduce transient poverty also reduce chronic poverty? The authors decompose measures of household poverty into chronic and transient components and use censored conditional quantile estimators to investigate the...

Does risk perpetuate poverty in a credit-constrained economy? Jalan and Ravallion study portfolio and other behavioral responses to measured risk using household panel data for rural China. One-quarter of wealth is held in unproductive liquid forms. But only a small share of this appears to be a...

The authors test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural China. They estimate the risk insurance models by Generalized Method of Moments, treating income and household size as endogenous. Insurance exists for all wealth groups, although the...

Theoretical work has shown that nonlinear dynamics in household incomes can yield poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth. If this is true, the potential implications for policy are dramatic: effective social protection from transient poverty would be an investment with lasting benefits,...

The authors use propensity-score matching methods to estimate the income gains to families of workers participating in an Argentinian work-fare program. The methods they propose are feasible for evaluating safety net interventions in settings in which many other methods are not feasible. The...

The effects of public investments aimed at directly improving children's health are theoretically ambiguous, since the outcomes also depend on indirect effects through parental inputs. The authors investigate the role of such inputs in influencing the incidence of child health gains from access...

Income gains from participation in economic programs are estimated as the difference between income with the program and that without it. The "with" data can be collected without much difficulty. But the "without" data are fundamentally unobserved, since an individual cannot be both a...

Can place of residence make the difference between growth and contraction in living standards for otherwise identical households? The authors test for the existence of spatial poverty traps, using a micro model of consumption growth incorporating geographic externalities, whereby neighborhood...