The nature and location of urbanization economies and their effects on productivity per worker in China are examined. Unlike previous studies, more accurate resident-based measures of urban scale from the 2010 census are used. The size of urbanization economies is similar to those in other...

China’s local populations can be counted in two ways; by how many people have hukou household registration from each place and by how many people actually reside in each place. The counts differ by the non-hukou migrants – people that move from their place of registration – who have grown...

The goal of the World Bank is 'a world free of poverty' but the most widely used poverty measures do not show when poverty might be eliminated. The 'head-count index' simply counts the poor, while the 'poverty gap index' shows their average shortfall from the poverty line. Neither measure...

In urban China the Household Income and Expenditure Survey requires respondents to keep a daily expenditure diary for a full 12-month period. This onerous reporting task makes it difficult to recruit households into the survey, compromising the representative nature of the sample. In this...

In this note, propensity score matching (PSM) methods are applied to data from the 2005 International Social Survey Program Work Orientations (ISSP-WO) survey to examine the public sector pay premium in New Zealand. Taking account of a wide range of worker characteristics and attitudes, job...

Asian governments intervene in the world rice market to protect domestic consumers. Whether consumers are nutritionally vulnerable depends on the elasticity of calories with respect to rice prices. Common demand models applied to household survey and market price data ignore quality substitution...

If relative prices of goods within a commodity group are constant, Hicksian separability lets the price of a single good represent the group price level. This is relied on by price questionnaires used in household surveys. Methods of estimating demand systems from household survey data also rely...

School attendance boundaries are a contentious issue in New Zealand, and have been relaxed and re-imposed depending upon political sentiment. Critics contend that a supposedly egalitarian state school system becomes one of selection by mortgage, with the value of ‘free’ schools capitalized...

Seasonal migration programs are widely used around the world, and are increasingly seen as offering a potential 'triple-win'- benefiting the migrant, sending country, and receiving country. Yet there is a dearth of rigorous evidence as to their development impact, and concerns about whether the...

Standard error corrections for clustered samples impose untested restrictions on spatial correlations. Our example shows these are too conservative, compared with a spatial error model that exploits information on exact locations of observations, causing inference errors when cluster corrections...