Zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam and can be understood as a form of religious duty, purifying one's wealth and at the same time functioning as a means to redistribute wealth to those in need. In Arabic, zakat means, among others, growth and purity (Dean and Khan 1997). In...

Livelihood diversification is attracting considerable interest as a tool to cope with economic shocks and resist vulnerability. This paper investigates the evolution of livelihood diversification in Egypt with a particular focus on wealth and urban-rural divides. Using Egypt Labor Market Panel...

Social protection policies can help address the multifaceted nature of child poverty and improve children's well-being, especially in the areas of education, health and nutrition. Providing adequate social protection to children is particularly relevant in the Middle East and North Africa...

This paper examines the reasons behind the low rates of participation in old age pension programs in developing countries. Using a large set of harmonized household surveys from Latin America we assess how much of the low participation can be explained by involuntary rationing out of jobs with...

This paper investigates the causal consequences of Tropical Storm Agatha (2010) - the strongest tropical storm ever to strike Guatemala since rainfall records have been kept - on household welfare. The analysis reveals substantial negative effects, particularly among urban households. Per capita...

This paper evaluates the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY) to the pandemic. Additional years spent in poverty (PY) are conservatively...

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about massive declines in wellbeing around the world. This paper seeks to quantify and compare two important components of those losses – increased mortality and higher poverty – using years of human life as a common metric. We estimate that almost 20...

Riedel and Sass (2013) study complete information normal form games in which ambiguity averse players use ambiguous randomization strategies, in addition to pure and mixed strategies. The solution concept they propose, the Ellsberg equilibrium, is a coarsening of the classical Nash equilibrium....