Poverty estimates usually lag behind two years, which makes it difficult to provide real-time poverty analysis to assess the impact of economic crisis and shocks among the less well-off, and subsequently limits policy responses. This paper takes advantage of up-to-date average economic welfare...

Mozambique is among the African countries most exposed to weather-related hazards. Using detailed gridded precipitation data for individuals' birth-year and birth-district, this study investigates the effects of extreme rainfall anomalies around the time of birth on long-run well-being. The...

This paper investigates the effects of multiple weather shocks on household welfare in Mozambique, as well as some of the coping responses and price mechanisms at play. The analysis employs a triple-difference strategy that exploits variation in the shocks across space, time, and cropping...

With a large share of the population dependent on agriculture and high exposure to natural disasters and other food price shocks, the welfare impacts of food price inflation in Mozambique cannot be ignored. This paper performs incidence analysis exploiting the spatial location of households to...

In Latin America, labor markets have been the main channel through which growth has reduced poverty, with higher labor income accounting for 49 percent of the reduction in poverty in 2008?13. Understanding labor markets is critical to designing policies and programs aimed at reducing poverty....

Economic theory of public bureaucracies as complex organizations predicts that bureaucratic productivity can be shaped by the selection of different types of agents, beyond their incentives. This theory applies to the institutions of local government in the developing world, where nationally...

Public health systems that are capable of disease surveillance and action to prevent and manage outbreaks require trustworthy community-embedded public health workers who are empowered to undertake their tasks as professionals. Economic theory on incentives and norms of agents tasked with...

This paper contributes to the methodological literature on the estimation of poverty lines for country poverty comparisons in Latin America and the Caribbean. The paper exploits a unique, comprehensive data set of 86 up-to-date urban official extreme and moderate poverty lines across 18...

This paper investigates the causal consequences of Tropical Storm Agatha (2010) -- the strongest tropical storm everto strike Guatemala since rainfall records have been kept -- on household welfare. The analysis reveals substantial negative effects, particularly among urban households. Per...

This paper implements a machine learning approach to estimate intra-generational economic mobility using cross-sectional data. A Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (Lasso) procedure is applied to explore poverty dynamics and household-level welfare growth in the absence of panel...