Although empowerment is seen as intrinsically important and instrumentally valuable to escape poverty, there is very little research on the empirical drivers of empowerment. Using custom-made household-level information and using advanced econometric techniques that also correct for endogeneity,...

Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of poverty convergence in aggregate data despite the conditional convergence of per capita income levels and the close linkage between growth and...

Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We...

This paper uses an augmented gravity model of trade to investigate the link between German development aid and sectoral exports from Germany to the aid recipient countries. The findings indicate that in the long run each dollar of German aid is associated with an average increase of 0.83 US...

In this paper we study the decline in total fertility rates in the Czech Republic during the transition process. To identify transition-specific features of this decline we use a multiperiod model of birth process and apply it to the family and fertility survey of 1998. In a standard duration...

As is now well documented, aid is given for both political as well as economic reasons. The conventional wisdom is that politically-motivated aid is less effective in promoting developmental objectives. We examine the ex-post performance ratings of World Bank projects and generally find that...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a...

Many low income countries are experiencing a 'nutrition transition' towards the consumption of more energy-dense, highly processed foods and beverages that are often high in caloric sweeteners, fat and salt. Changing lifestyles and urbanisation have coincided with a 'retail revolution', a rapid...

Hat das schnelle Wirtschaftswachstum in Entwicklungs- und Schwellenländern die Beschäftigungs- und Verdienstmöglichkeiten von Frauen verbessert? Dieser Beitrag fasst bestehende Erkenntnisse aus der Literatur zusammen. Zum einen scheint klar zu sein, dass bessere Bildungs- und...

We examine the determinants of the number of attendees and questions and comments in parallel sessions at a large economics conference. We use the annual meeting of the German economics association in 2012 in G ttingen as an empirical case study. We find that the place (close to the coffee and...