This essay examines the influence of a politician's party on her accountability to the electorate. It also considers what the conjectured waning of political parties may imply for the effectiveness of elections in disciplining politicians, and for voter welfare. The paper models the election...

Many poor countries are plagued with growth-impeding institutions. We develop a three-sector general equilibrium model linking economic stagnation in these countries to poor export terms of trade. We examine the extent to which changes in the terms of trade affect private agents’ incentive to...

We provide a systematic treatment of the notion of economic insecurity, assuming that an individual’s sentiment of insecurity depends on the current wealth level and its variations experienced in the past. We think of wealth as a comprehensive variable encompassing anything that may help in...

We provide a systematic treatment of the notion of economic insecurity, assuming that an individual’s sentiment of insecurity depends on the current wealth level and its variations experienced in the past. We think of wealth as a comprehensive variable encompassing anything that may help in...

We investigate how to make poverty comparisons using multidimensional indicators of well-being, showing in particular how to check whether the comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures and to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines. In contrast to earlier work, our methodology...

This paper explores the dynamics of voting over mandatory education when parents allocate children's time between school and labor. When poverty keeps a sufficiently high number of children at work rather than in school, the availability of forms of child labor that provide skill-enhancimg...

We propose a general class of indices of horizontal inequity that complements existing classes of progressivity and vertical equity indices. The class of horizontal inequity indices can also correct for biases in measuring a general class of inequality measures. We illustrate our results using...

Income inequality measures involve two sub-classes of decomposable measures: those decomposed by sub-groups and those decomposed by income source. The former enables one to compute between- and within-group indices. The latter allows for gauging the inequality related to each factor of income...

Dans cet article, nous analysons l'impact des politiques de transferts publics sur la pauvreté au Canada et aux états-Unis à l'aide de la base de données du Luxembourg Income Study. Pour ce faire, nous utilisons une méthode basée sur la valeur de Shapley afin de pouvoir attribuer à chaque...

This paper uses a computable general equilibrium (CGE) microsimulation model to explore the distributional and poverty-related effects of price reform in the electricity sector of Mali, a poor country in West Africa. In the first part of the paper we analyze the distribution of electricity in...