Measures of standard of living and of poverty are plagued by the obvious gap between the relative simplicity of the indices and the infinite complexity of what they are trying to capture. Some trade-off between the simplicity desirable in an index, and real-life complexity is inevitable. The...

Our starting point is to re-examine the concept of poverty, in particular its ethical dimensions, in order to understand more clearly exactly what poverty lines are intended to capture. Our concern with poverty lines is twofold. First, they are not credible measures of poverty, because they...

The idea of social justice is a powerful call to collective action. While there will be some who are indifferent to the pursuit of social justice, there can be few who are against it. Education, in its tum, is a powerful instrument of collective action. It is squarely in the public domain, with...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the case for viewing people as individuals, in a public policy context, and the case for viewing them as members of a family. In doing so, the author starts with the facts about low wage workers, unemployed workers and the welfare system. Section 3...

The causes of poverty in rural China have been explained in a variety of ways. These explanations include poor natural endowments, a high dependency ratio and inadequate capital and education. These explanations are examined using a unique set of survey data.

Income is one measure of material well-being. But do the people with the lowest income also work the longest hours? Are they also malnuourished and unable to read? Do social isolation and ill-health compound the hardships of low income? On the evidence presented in this paper the answer for poor...

We consider non-cooperative environments in which two players have the power to commit but cannot sign binding agreements. We show that by committing to a set of actions rather than to a single action, players can implement a wide range of action profiles. We give a complete characterization of...

In this study we investigate the impact of competition on markets for non-durable goods where intertemporal price discrimination is possible. We develop a simple model of different potential scenarios for intertemporal price discrimination and implement it in a laboratory experiment. We compare...

Wage posting models of job search typically assume that firms can commit to paying workers the posted wage. This paper investigates the consequences of relaxing this assumption. Under ``downward'' commitment, firms can commit only to paying at least their advertised wage. We show that wage...