In this paper the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) is constructed with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS). Using the SIGI, we test the effects of social institutions related to gender inequality on several development outcomes, such as female education,...

In a recent paper in the Review of Economic Studies, Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray (Anderson and Ray, 2010) develop and apply a new ‘flow’ measure of ‘missing women’ to estimate the extent of gender bias in mortality in developing countries. Contrary to the existing literature, they find...

One of the most serious weaknesses of the human development index (HDI) is does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have also used aggregate information and there exists no HDI at the household...

This paper investigates whether heterogeneous subgroups of female-headed households are worse off than traditional households headed by men. We analyze the determinants of consumption, shock exposure and vulnerability to poverty. Using unique panel data of over 4000 rural households from...

In this article, we critically review the three most common approaches of assessing chronic food insecurity and undernutrition: (i) the FAO indicator of undernourishment, (ii) household food consumption surveys, and (iii) childhood anthropometrics. There is a striking and worrying degree of...

Most numerical targets within the framework of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are overly ambitious for the poorest countries when interpreted as country-specific goals. As a consequence, the current system undermines accountability and ownership and jeopardizes the public support the...

While it is widely presumed that development progress in so-called fragile states is lagging behind, only very limited empirical analysis exists that investigates to what extent the levels and trends in the MDGs differ significantly between fragile and other developing countries, and between...

This paper uses the gravity model of trade to investigate the link between foreign aid and exports in recipient countries. Most of the theoretical work emphasizes the negative impact of aid on recipient countries’ exports primarily due to exchange rate appreciation, disregarding possible...

This article proposes a simple and fast approach to build simultaneous confidence bands and perform specification tests for smooth curves in additive models. The method allows for handling of spatially heterogeneous functions and its derivatives as well as heteroscedasticity in the data. It is...