Estimates of poverty are highly sensitive to price and income measures across time and space. This paper offers a complementary approach to traditional poverty measurement that ensures comparability: we use nighttime light as a proxy for poverty measurement. We measure the percentage of...

China’s economic development in recent decades has been tremendous, but subject to debate. This paper calculates regional prices that make incomes comparable across both time and space using the Engel-curve approach. Incomes are adjusted using these price indices, providing new estimates of...

China’s economic development in recent decades has been tremendous, but subject to debate. This paper calculates regional prices that make incomes comparable across both time and space using the Engel-curve approach. Incomes are adjusted using these price indices, providing new estimates of...

In repeated games, it is hard to distinguish true prosocial behavior from strategic instrumental behavior. In particular, a player does not know whether a reciprocal action is intrinsically or instrumentally motivated. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the relationship between...

Standard ways of measuring real income are known to be inconsistent with consumer preferences. We provide preference-consistent estimates of real income, based on the income-specific price indices that are consistent with nonhomothetic preferences. We find that existing measures, such as Geary,...

Since the late 1970s, the price indices underlying the poverty lines in India have been updated using aggregate indices. Widespread criticism of these indices led to the adoption of a new official methodology in 2011 based on unit values from consumption survey data. We propose an alternative...

This paper shows one way of generalizing the standard framework of inequality measurement to allow for a distinction between fair and unfair inequalities. We introduce the unfairness Lorenz curve and the unfairness Gini, which are generalizations of the standard versions of the Lorenz curve and...

This paper studies the role of family background in explaining differences in the willingness to compete. By combining data from a lab experiment conducted with a representative sample of adolescents in Norway and high quality register data on family background, we show that family background is...