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,...

Can place of residence make the difference between growth and contraction in living standards for otherwise identical households? The authors test for the existence of spatial poverty traps, using a micro model of consumption growth incorporating geographic externalities, whereby neighborhood...

Poor-area development programs- in which the government transfers extra resources to unusually poor areas -have been widely used to fight poverty. There has been some research on such programs, but little is known about their impact on household living standards over time. The authors address...

Empirical studies of tax and benefit incidence routinely ignore behavioral responses and measurement errors. This paper offers an econometric method of estimating the mean benefit withdrawal rate (marginal tax rate) allowing for incentive effects, measurement errors, and correlated latent...

Against what standards should we judge the developing world's overall performance against poverty going forward? The paper proposes two measures, each with both"optimistic"and"ambitious"targets for 2022, 10 years from the time of writing. The first measure is absolute consumption poverty, as...

How much economic mobility is there across generations in a poor, primarily rural, economy? How much do intergenerational linkages contribute to current inequality? We address these questions using original survey data on Senegal that include a sub-household measure of consumption for cells...