Frequent measurement of poverty is challenging because measurement often relies on complex and expensive expenditure surveys that try to measure expenditures on a comprehensive consumption aggregate. This paper investigates the use of consumption subaggregates instead. The use of consumption...

This paper provides practical tests for the robustness of multidimensional comparisons of well-being. Focussing on counting-type multidimensional poverty measures, I draw on the properties of positive Boolean threshold functions to prove that the space of feasible poverty definitions is finite...

This paper confirms recent evidence of a positive impact of aid on growth and widens the scope of evaluation to a range of outcomes including proximate sources of growth (e.g., physical and human capital), indicators of social welfare (e.g., poverty and infant mortality), and measures of...

Does foreign aid promote aggregate economic growth? In contrast to widespread perceptions, academic studies of this question have been rapidly converging towards a positive answer. We employ a simulation approach to (i) validate the coherence of recent empirics and (ii) calculate plausible...

The notion that foreign aid harms the institutions of recipient governments remains prevalent. We combine new disaggregated aid data and various metrics of political institutions to re-examine this relationship. Long-run cross-section and alternative dynamic panel estimators show a small...

Despite the importance attributed to intergenerational educational mobility in the process of development, there remains little consensus on how mobility should be measured. We present analytical and empirical evidence regarding the sensitivity of alternative estimators to different forms of...

This paper builds on a longitudinal school-to-work transition phone survey experiment to quantify the effects on attrition of communicating with participants. Specifically, we study the impact of sending topically relevant information on job market conditions via SMS at the start of each survey...