Are the determinants of chronic and transient poverty different? Do policies that reduce transient poverty also reduce chronic poverty? The authors decompose measures of household poverty into chronic and transient components and use censored conditional quantile estimators to investigate the...

Does risk perpetuate poverty in a credit-constrained economy? Jalan and Ravallion study portfolio and other behavioral responses to measured risk using household panel data for rural China. One-quarter of wealth is held in unproductive liquid forms. But only a small share of this appears to be a...

The authors test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural China. They estimate the risk insurance models by Generalized Method of Moments, treating income and household size as endogenous. Insurance exists for all wealth groups, although the...

Theoretical work has shown that nonlinear dynamics in household incomes can yield poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth. If this is true, the potential implications for policy are dramatic: effective social protection from transient poverty would be an investment with lasting benefits,...

We find that the distribution of income matters to aggregate carbon dioxide emissions and hence global warming. Higher inequality, both between and within countries is associated with lower carbon emissions at given average incomes. We also confirm that economic growth generally comes with...

How important are neighborhood endowments of physical and human capital in explaining diverging fortunes over time for otherwise identical households? To answer this question we develop an estimable micro model of consumption growth allowing for constraints on factor mobility and externalities,...

We apply recent advances in propensity-score matching (PSM) to the problem of estimating the distribution of net income gains from an Argentinean workfare program. PSM has a number of attractive features in this context, including the need to allow for heterogeneous impacts, while optimally...