In the wake of the food, fuel and financial shocks, a fourth wave of the global economic crisis began to sweep across developing countries in 2010: fiscal austerity. Serving as an update of earlier research by UNICEF, this working paper: (i) examines the latest IMF government spending...

This article begins by constructing a model of stratified and divergent economic growth integrating economic geography, human development and endogenous technological change. Even in the presence of perfect capital, goods, and labor markets, economic geography and local governance can lead to...

This research examines the effects of mothers' welfare and work decisions on their children's attainments using a random effect instrumental variables (REIV) estimator. The estimator employs sibling comparisons in a random effect framework and an instrumental variables approach to address the...

In March of 2009 participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) reached an all time high of 40.2 million persons. A significant body of research has emerged suggesting that participation in the SNAP increases the probability of being obese for adult women, and has little...

Measuring the intergenerational mobility of welfare provides key inputs for policies, but very few studies examine intergenerational mobility of subjective well-being (SWB), particularly in a poorer, transitional country context. We make new contributions by analyzing rich panel SWB data from...

This study investigated the effects of welfare reform in the 1990s, which represented a major policy shift that substantially and permanently retracted cash assistance to poor mothers in the U.S., on parenting. Using data on women from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth...

The time parents devote to caring for their children is an enormous and under-appreciated component of society's investment in human capital. These investments may be at risk mainly due to the growing proportion of women entering the labor market. This paper investigates the determinants of...

This paper investigates how women's migration and labor supply behaviors respond to changes in welfare policies and labor market conditions, controlling for endogenous initial residence and unobserved heterogeneity. It also traces out how these responses influence educational inputs and child...

Physical and sexual abuse are very common among welfare recipients. The relation of abuse to welfare receipt remains largely unknown, however, because most research has been limited to current and former recipients. This paper uses a random sample of poor women to determine how a history of...