Consumption baskets vary across households and inflation rates vary across goods. As a result, standard consumer price index (CPI) inflation may provide a misleading measure of the inflation actually faced by poor households, more so the more unequal the distribution of aggregate consumption...

This paper examines the extent of consumption risk sharing for a group of 50 high-income and developing countries. The analysis is based on the empirical implementation of a model of partial consumption insurance whose parameters have the natural interpretation of coefficients of partial risk...

Workers' remittances have become a major source of income for developing countries. However, little is still known about their impact on poverty and inequality. Using a large cross-country panel dataset, the authors find that remittances in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries have...

This paper explores the impact of remittances on poverty, education, and health in 11 Latin American countries using nationally representative household surveys and making an explicit attempt to account for one of the inherent costs associated with migration - the potential income that the...

Existing empirical evidence indicates that remittances have a positive impact on a good number of development indicators of recipient countries. Yet when flows are too large relative to the size of the recipient economies, as those observed in a number of Latin American countries, they may also...

Deepening real and financial integration of developing countries into the world economy has prompted renewed interest in the contribution of external shocks to their macroeconomic fluctuations. This paper revisits the issue using four decades of annual data for a large sample of developing...

For reason of empirical tractability, analysis of cointegrated economic time series is often developed in a partial setting, in which a subset of variables is explicitly modeled conditional on the rest. This approach yields valid inference only if the conditioning variables are weakly exogenous...

Academics and policy makers have long considered an adequate supply of infrastructure services to be essential for economic development. This paper reviews recent theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of infrastructure development on growth and income distribution. The theoretical...

The authors empirically study the sensitivity of local interest rates to international interest rates and how that sensitivity is affected by a country's choice of exchange rate regime. To establish the empirical regularities, they use a reduced-form empirical approach to compute both panel and...

An extensive literature on poverty traps suggests that high levels of poverty deter growth. However, a seemingly basic implication of the underlying theoretical models, namely that countries suffering from higher levels of poverty should grow less rapidly, has remained untested. A parallel...