This dissertation focuses on the relationship between gender equality and economic development, broadly defined. Since the seminal work of Ester Boserup (1970), gender equality is widely understood as being both an instrument for and a consequence of economic development. The first three...

Um Armut zu bekämpfen, muss die menschliche Entwicklung gestärkt werden. Allerdings werden heute 250 Millionen Kinder unter 5 Jahren in Ländern mit niedrigem und mittlerem Einkommen wahrscheinlich nicht ihr volles Entwicklungspotenzial erreichen. Um Hindernisse für eine optimale menschliche...

Ein zusammengesetzter Index ist eine aggregierte Variable, die aus individuellen Indikatoren und Gewichten besteht, wobei die Gewichte die relative Wichtigkeit jedes Indikators darstellen. Zusammengesetzte Indizes werden oft benutzt um latente Phänomene zu schreiben oder komplexe Informationen...

In this paper the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) is constructed with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS). Using the SIGI, we test the effects of social institutions related to gender inequality on several development outcomes, such as female education,...

The dissertation contributes to three important issues in development economics, i.e. corruption behavior, the monitoring of development-linked public goods and inequality. The dissertation uniquely combines both empirical and experimental methods. Chapter 1 examines corruption (anti-social...

Zusammenfassung Die drei Essays dieser Dissertation leisten einen Beitrag zum Verständnis der politischen Ökonomie Indonesiens in Zeiten der Dezentralisierung. Vor dem Hintergrund des "Urban Poverty Project 2" (UPP2), einem kommunalen Entwicklungsprojekt in Indonesien, untersucht der erste...

The thesis consists of four essays in the broad spectrum of development economics. While the first three essays are in the sphere of poverty measurement, the fourth essay is on the topic of trade and development. In recent years, the issue of international poverty measurement gained in...

In recent years, debates about inequality have reached a renewed intensity in international policy debates. This is partly the result of much better data on the extent of inequality, where the work by Piketty on the top 1% has revealed much larger (and rising) inequality than previously known...

This dissertation includes three empirical essays on development economics and one on the economics of education. The first essay (co-authored by Stephan Klasen) is a contribution to the debate surrounding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the on-going debate about what international...