The goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and working toward a more equal distribution of income are prominent in international development and agreed upon in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 10. Using data from 164 countries comprising 97 percent of the world's...

Although household well-being is anchored in long-term average rates of consumption, welfare comparisons typically rely on shorter-duration survey measurements. This paper develops a new strategy to identify the distribution of these long-term rates by leveraging a large-scale randomization that...

This paper uses data obtained from three Moroccan household surveys that took place between 2000 to 2013, to address issues related to the so-called "Arab puzzle." Welfare inequalities are low and declining in Arab countries and exist against the backdrop of a growing sense of dissatisfaction...

Housing is the largest durable good consumed by households. As such, any consumption-based measure of welfare, to be comprehensive, must include the value of the flow of services households derive from their dwellings, the so-called imputed rent. However, estimating imputed rents is a daunting...

This paper argues for night-lights data as an alternative data source for measuring spatial inequalities in Africa, where the paucity of subnational income data is persistent. The analysis compares the statistical relationships between income and lights-based measures of spatial income...

This paper proposes a model-based approach to estimate income boundaries for identifying the middle class in Kazakhstan over 2003-15. The approach exploits the subjective evaluation of Kazakhstan households about their social status, relating self-declared social class membership to income....