This paper provides a new test for whether different-currency assets are imperfect substitutes. The test exploits that under floating rates, changing public currency demand has no direct effect on monetary fundamentals, current or future. Price effects from imperfect substitutability are clearly...

Micro-based exchange-rate research examines the determination and behavior of spot exchange rates in an environment that replicates the key features of trading in the foreign exchange (FX) market. Traditional macro exchange-rate models play little attention to how trading in the FX market...

We empirically examine how the global carry trade affects the dynamics of spot exchange rates and interest rates across 13 countries from 2000, through the world financial crisis, until the end of 2011. Our model identifies the weekly carry trade position in each currency by matching data on...

This paper considers the case for universal child allowances in Ghana. It follows findings from an earlier study of 14 middle income countries that examined optimal approaches to reduce child poverty using universal categorical child allowances. The paper describes the demographic profiles that...

In 2015, leaders of all countries committed to "eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere" by 2030. In the past 25 years, the world has managed to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty (World Bank, 2015). Yet despite this progress, at least 400 million people will still...

This paper aims to better understand the income factors that influenced child poverty rates across a group of four diverse middle-income countries in 2010. We use data from LIS to analyze child poverty using harmonized measures of income in Russia, Mexico, South Africa, and Colombia. The paper...

The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data is expanding to cover "middle income" countries that supplement the large, existing sample of countries which are "high income" in the LIS Database. Developing countries tend to have social protection systems that are less formalized, and financial...

This paper uses data from 14 Middle Income Countries in the Luxembourg Income Study database to examine the position of children in the income distributions, and to calculate child poverty prevalence, to assess how far children receive transfers from state social protection systems compared to...

Child poverty remains staggeringly high. One in five children live on less than $1.90 a day and children are more than twice as likely to be living in extreme income poverty compared with adults. Despite clear evidence of the effectiveness of well-designed social protection in tackling child...