ABSTRACT: The concept of a poverty function is introduced, modelling the shortfall of household consumption from the poverty line as a function of reduced form determinants such as human capital and land holdings. The model is estimated using a tobit and data from Uganda. Parameters from the...

The Millennium Development Goals have placed poverty reduction at the top of donor organisations` list of priorities. Failure to achieve the MDGs will no doubt place the spotlight on their financial commitments to poverty reduction, but effective poverty reduction relies as much on knowledge of...

Importance sampling is used in many aspects of modern econometrics to approximate unsolvable integrals. Its reliable use requires the sampler to possess a variance, for this guarantees a square root speed of convergence and asymptotic normality of the estimator of the integral. However, this...

Uninsured risk has substantial welfare costs, not just in the short run, but also in terms of perpetuating poverty. This paper discusses the scope for extending insurance to the poor, drawing mainly on examples from Latin American and Caribbean countries. It is argued that insurance provision to...

For many research problems in developing countries, some information on prices faced by households is required for the analysis, but these prices are not readily available from household surveys, nor is it straightforward to observe them, especially if subsistence consumption is a substantial...

We use high frequency financial data to proxy, via the realised variance, each days financial variability. Based on a semiparametric stochastic volatility process, a limit theory shows you can represent the proxy as a true underlying variability plus some measurement noise with known...

Assessing changes in poverty levels over time is bedevilled by problems in questionnaire design, the choice of the poverty line, the exact timing of the survey and uncertainty about the appropriate cost-of-living deflators. In this paper, we focus on testing the robustness of measured changes in...

A simple model of an open exchange economy with two commodities is used to investigate the relative merits of small and large reforms: reforms are represented as movements in the relative price of the two commodities, achieved by tightening or relaxing quotas. Three approaches, based on majority...

We study the effect of hyperbolic discounting on competitive equilibria in secondary markets for a durable good. Under exponential discounting, secondary markets are irrelevant in our model. They do not affect the price in the initial period and are neutral to the allocation. Under hyperbolic...

This paper examines the factors contributing to the rise in unemployment in Australia during the depression of the 1930s and to its decline in the subsequent recovery. While previous writers have generally argued that demand side variables were predominant, it has also claimed that excessive...