This study uses simulations to explore the possibility of halving the percentage of people living in extreme poverty in Africa by 2015. A pro-poor growth-scenario and a constant-inequality scenario are compared. It is shown that initial levels of inequality and mean per capita income determine...

In this paper, we address the question of optimal wage and income dispersion in a growing economy. If already in the two-persons-case we have to deal with the fact of different marginal products of labor, there are two solutions in principle. Either two different wages are paid (at unanimous...

Using panel data spanning 15 years, this paper investigates the persistence and correlates of subjective and consumption poverty in urban Ethiopia. Despite the decline in consumption poverty in recent years, which has been linked to rapid economic growth, subjective poverty has remained largely...

Previous studies of poverty in developing countries have to a great extent focused on the characteristics of the household head and used these as proxies for the underlying ability of the household to generate income. This paper uses five rounds of panel data to investigate the persistence of...

This paper analyses the relation between parents earnings and their childrens education. In a context of perfect altruism, the model describes parents decisions on how much to consume and how much to invest in their childrens education. The model predicts that returns on education in terms of...

I discuss how poverty decomposition methods relate to integral approximation, which is the foundation of decomposition of the temporal change of a quantity into key drivers. This offers a common framework for the different decomposition methods used in the literature, clarifies their often...

Estimates of household size economies are needed for the analysis of poverty and inequality. This paper shows that Engel estimates of size economies are large when household expenditures are obtained by respondent recall but small when expenditures are obtained by daily recording in diaries....

This paper investigates dynamics of poverty in urban Ethiopia using both subjective and objective definitions of poverty. The two sets of estimates of persistence and recurrence of poverty are similar, suggesting that consumption-based mobility estimates are not seriously distorted by...

We studied whether relative income has an impact on subjective well-being among extremely poor people. Contrary to the findings in developed countries, we cannot reject the hypothesis that relative income has no impact on subjective well-being in rural areas of northern Ethiopia.<p>

Abstract: In the LSMS data for Nepal most agricultural laborers report daily wages, while econometric analysis on the data indicates that, for many villages, the laborers actually have long-term contracts. We have visited some of the villages to solve this puzzle. We find that in some cases the...