This paper uses a vulnerability-based approach to analyze the evolution of the middle class in Europe between 2005-08 and 2015-18. The analysis reveals that, on average, the income level needed to ensure a low probability of falling into poverty-also understood as the vulnerability...

Workers have the right to take up any job offer in their country of citizenship but not to rent out that right. This paper shows that relaxing this restriction using a two-sided competitive market in work permits can provide a basic income guarantee for workers in migration-destination...

The authors estimate the economic losses related to the negative effect of smoking on wages in a context of a developing country. Using data from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Monitoring Survey, they jointly estimate a system of three equations: the smoking decision and two separate wage...

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? The authors study Indonesia s severe financial crisis of 1998. They use 10 national surveys spanning 1993 2002, each covering 200,000...

The authors use data from a large nationally representative survey in Russia to analyze the distributional and welfare implications of draft avoidance as a common response to Russia's highly unpopular conscription system. They develop a simple theoretical model that describes household...

The authors use 1993-94 and 1999-2000 India Employment and Unemployment surveys to investigate wage differentials between the public and private sectors as well as workers' decisions to join a particular sector. To obtain robust estimates of the wage differential, they apply three econometric...

Levels of child malnutrition in India fell only slowly during the 1990s, despite significant economic growth and large public spending on the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) program, of which the major component is supplementary feeding for malnourished children. To unravel this...

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...

Can self-assessed health be relied on to identify the true socioeconomic gradients in health status? The self-assessed health of Russian adults in 2002 shows remarkably little gradient with respect to economic welfare. The authors document this finding and assess its robustness to the...

Human capital investments in Pakistan are performing poorly; school enrollment is low, the high school dropout rate is high, and there is a definite gender gap in education. The authors conducted field surveys in 25 Pakistani villages and integrated their field observations, economic theory, and...