Decentralization, championed by international institutions, has been one of the most prominent public sector reforms of the last decades, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. To date, few studies propose a quasi-experimental evaluation of its capacity to contribute to local development. We...

Subjective well-being (SWB) data is increasingly used to perform welfare analyses. In- terpreted as 'experienced utility', SWB has recently been compared to 'decision utility' using specific experiments, most often based on stated preferences. Results point to an overall congruence between these...

Latent feelings of economic vulnerability and social stagnation may have catalyzed the unprecedented uprisings that shook Latin America and other parts of the world in 2018-2019. We document this process in the context of Chile, leveraging survey data on protest participation and its potential...

Since intra-household resource distribution is unobserved, it is difficult to compare how women and children fare across countries. To address this, we analyze 45 household expenditure surveys from predominantly low- and middle-income countries, i.e. an international sample of around 2.4 million...

Whether gender-targeted cash transfers effectively redistribute resources to women and children in poor households remains an open question. We examine Uruguay's largest social assistance program, Asignaciones Familiares (AFAM), which is directed at poor families with children and paid to women....

Social norms can mitigate the effectiveness of formal institutions, in particular the way legal reforms may affect women's autonomy. We examine this question in the context of ethnic variation in traditional post-marital cohabitation, i.e. matrilocality versus patrilocality. We use...

We suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess relative inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes, such as (continuous) earnings or (discrete and ordinal) education levels, and captures dynastic improvements of such outcomes at different points of the initial...

This paper aims to assess the extent to which top earners in Ecuador were affected by the COVID-19 crisis compared to other segments of the population. Our analysis uses administrative data for individuals affiliated to social security between January 2019 and December 2021. We identify the top...

One central lesson of the sovereign debt crisis is that the Eurozone (and the EU) needs institutional reform. Many observers argue that the monetary union should be complemented by a fiscal union . In this paper we provide the first quantitative analysis of important economic effects of an EU...

The literature on household behavior contains hardly any empirical research on the withinhousehold distributional effect of tax-benefit policies. We simulate this effect in the framework of a collective model of labor supply when shifting from a joint to an individual taxation system in France....