This paper’s goal is to identify the sources of expenditure and poverty dynamics among Malawian households between 1998 and 2002 and to model poverty transitions in Malawi using a bivariate probit model with endogenous selection to address the "initial conditions' problem. The exogeneity of...

In order to study the structure of society, sociologists usually distinguish several homogeneous social groups, or classes. The most common division consists of three groups: upper, middle and lower classes. Such a partition is traditionally based on a subjective (exogenous) criteria adopted by...

We present an exercise to account for changes in an indicator into components of a welfare aggregate. The decomposition presented in this paper focus on the distribution of the welfare variable rather than a decomposable indicator. Thus, it is a statistical exercise in which we assume that we...

This paper makes two contributions. First, it carries out an extensive analysis of episodes of poverty changes and documents the empirical distribution of poverty changes. This is useful for providing some context for assessing whether observed changes in poverty that a country may achieve are...

In aggregation theory, the admissibility condition for clustering together components to be aggregated is blockwise weak separability, which also is the condition needed to separate out sectors of the economy. Although weak separability is thereby of central importance in aggregation and index...

If the population of a given country evolves according to Gibrat'�s Law, its growth rate will be independent of its initial size. This short paper further investigates this empirical regularity by the application of a suitable panel unit root test and non-parametric methods. The evidence...

In studying the scale invariance of an empirical time series a twofold problem arises: it is necessary to test the series for self-similarity and, once passed such a test, the goal becomes to estimate the parameter H0 of self-similarity. The estimation is therefore correct only if the sequence...

Monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy is a key property of structural auction models. Traditional nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data, but do not formally impose the monotonicity assumption that is inherent in the models...