March 2000 - In subjective surveys, people who become ill or lose their jobs report reduced well-being, even if they later get a job. Perhaps their exposure to uninsured risk outside the formal employment sector reduces their expectations about future income. Do potential biases cloud the...

April 1999 - As conventionally measured, current household income relative to a poverty line can only partially explain how Russian adults perceive their economic welfare. Other factors include past incomes, individual incomes, household consumption, current unemployment, risk of unemployment,...

Does "empowerment" come hand-in-hand with higher economic welfare? In theory, higher income is likely to raise both power and welfare, but heterogeneity in other characteristics and household formation can either strengthen or weaken the relationship. Survey data on Russian adults indicate that...

"Theories of relative deprivation predict negative welfare effects when friends and neighbors become better-off. Other theories point to likely positive benefits. The authors encompass both views within a single model, which motivates their tests using a survey for Malawi that collected data on...

"The immediate welfare costs of an economywide crisis can be high, but are there also lasting impacts? And are they greater in some geographic areas than others? Ravallion and Lokshin study Indonesia's severe financial crisis of 1998. They use 10 national surveys spanning 1993--2002, each...

Attitudes toward redistribution of wealth in Russia tend to reflect expectations of future mobility, in both directions. Few Russians expected rising living standards in the 1990s, and most expected a decline in living standards, so there was strong demand for redistribution, even among those...

The claim that social protection is a luxury good--with a national income elasticity exceeding unity--has as been influential. The paper tests the "luxury good hypothesis" using newly-assembled data on social protection spending across countries since 1995, treating the pandemic period...