We test for the existence of poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth using a nonlinear dynamic panel data model of household incomes allowing for endogenous attrition. Our estimates for Hungary and Russia in the 1990s reveal significant nonlinearity in the dynamics, consistent with the...

We test for the existence of poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth using a nonlinear dynamic panel data model of household incomes allowing for endogenous attrition. Our estimates for Hungary and Russia in the 1990s reveal significant nonlinearity in the dynamics, consistent with the...

Can self-assessments of health reveal the true health differentials between 'rich' and 'poor'? The potential sources of bias include psychological adaptation to ill-health, socioeconomic covariates of health reporting errors and income measurement errors. We propose an estimation method to...

We study the poverty impacts over time and space of Indonesia’s severe economy-wide crisis of 1998, using 10 large national surveys spanning 1993–2002. On allowing for shifts in relative prices stemming from the crisis, we find a sharp but geographically uneven increase in the poverty rate...

If relative deprivation matters to welfare in poor countries as much as it apparently does in rich ones then one would have to question the priority given to economic growth over redistribution in current development policies. We look for evidence in one of the world's poorest countries, Malawi....

In theory, it is possible that the persistent poverty that has emerged in many transition economies, is attributable to underlying, non-convexities in the dynamics of household incomes - such that a vulnerable household will never recover from a sufficiently large, but short-lived shock to its...

It seems natural to expect the rich to oppose policies to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, and the poor to favor such policies. But this may be too simple a model, say the Authors. Expectations of future welfare may come into play. Well-off people on a downward trajectory may well...

Paradoxically, when economists analyze a policy's impact on welfare they typically assume that people are the best judges of their own welfare, yet resist directly asking them if they are better off. Early ideas of"utility"were explicitly subjective, but modern economists generally ignore...

The immediate welfare costs of an economywide crisis can be high, but are there also lasting impacts? And are they greater in some geographic areas than others? The authors study Indonesia’s severe financial crisis of 1998. They use 10 national surveys spanning 1993–2002, each covering...