This paper offers an axiomatic characterization of two classes of poverty measures that are sensitive to inequality of opportunity -- one a strict subset of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to differences in the...

The 2001/02 Argentine crisis had a profound impact on Uruguay's economy. Uruguay's gross domestic product shrank by 17.5 percent and the proportion of people living below the poverty line doubled in just two years. It took almost 10 years for the poverty rate to recover to its pre-crisis level....

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. This study uses two new metadata...

Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes three methodological...

Socioeconomic segregation is often decried for denying poorer children the benefits of positive'peer effects'. Yet standard, linear-in-means models of peer effects (a) implicitly assume that segregation is zero sum, with gains and losses to rich and poor perfectly offsetting, and (b) rule out...

Many developing countries faced macroeconomic shocks in the 1980s and 1990s. The impact of the shocks on welfare depended on the nature of the shock, on initial household and community conditions, and on policy responses. To avoid severe and lasting losses to poor and vulnerable groups,...