Time poverty is a key yet conceptually contested dimension of household living standards. Both univariate and bivariate measures remain debated because there is no clear consensus on how to define and quantify socially necessary unpaid work, the time that money cannot substitute for, across...

We estimate daily wage rates for skilled and unskilled construction workers and agricultural laborers in Switzerland from 1750 to 1860, a period of profound political and economic transformations. Our analysis is based on 17,700 newly collected wage quotes from primary sources and 23,300 price...

Revealed preference theory (RPT) and its behavioral extension (BRPT) underpin an important strand of welfare economics. Their normative appeal rests on the claim that welfare can be inferred from observed behavior without substantive assumptions about what agents should value - a property I call...

The three South Caucasus economies - Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia - have performed relatively well since the COVID-19 pandemic, benefiting from certain spillovers of Russia's war against Ukraine. The oil importers Armenia and Georgia achieved double-digit GDP growth in 2022 - 12.6% and 11.0%,...

How do minimum wages affect informality? We study the near-doubling of the real minimum wage from 2000 to 2009 in Brazil, where 46% of the workforce is informal. Using labor force surveys covering the informal sector, we show the minimum wage exhibits near full passthrough to informal employees...

Amid escalating climate risks and uneven decarbonization trajectories, understanding the distributional determinants of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is essential for guiding Asia toward equitable and sustainable development. Anchored in the Environmental Kuznets Curve framework and the...

Obtaining comparable poverty estimates over time is critical for monitoring poverty trends and informing effective poverty reduction policies. Yet hardly any developing countries could construct consistent poverty trends over extended time periods due to changes to the consumption survey...

Subjective wellbeing is the term used to describe an individual's satisfaction with their life and standard of living. The research in this area is challenging because it is a subjective expression of the respondent's feelings, and individuals may have different ideas or preferences. On the...

A comprehensive understanding of economic deprivation requires examining income, the value of unpaid household services, and leisure. These concepts can be understood either through subjective utility or objective indicators such as measurable expenditures and time use, and much depends on how...

This paper uses cross-sectional surveys of households over 2007-21 from Thailand's Socio-Economic Expenditure Survey to conduct one of the first investigations of the impacts of climatic variability on two key statistics characterizing the distribution of welfare in Thailand: the mean and the...

This paper examines the welfare effects of Tanzania's 2021 levy on mobile money transfers, a policy that sharply increased transaction costs in a country where mobile money is the primary channel for financial access and remittances. Using two waves of the Tanzania National Panel Survey (2014/15...

We provide new evidence that inflation inequality surged during the 2021–2023 cost-of living crisis, driven by systematically higher price growth for lower-quality goods disproportionately consumed by poorer households. While substitution in response to relative price changes helped mitigate...

Material deprivation, defined as the inability to afford essential goods and services, is a key determinant of psychological well-being across Europe. While prior research links deprivation to lower well-being and diminished institutional trust, few or no studies to date have examined how trust...

"Background to the study and data Basis: - The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused a massive refugee movement since February 24, 2022, with mostly women and children fleeing to European countries, including Germany. Around one million people from Ukraine have now been living in Germany for...

Utilising the EU-SILC modules 2009, 2014, and 2021, this note analyses child-specific material deprivation in the EU Member States. Besides the statistics on the most frequently lacked items, the child-specific material deprivation intensity (i.e., the number of lacked items) and the...

The essay traces the evolution of my academic career through three stages: as a Habsburg economic historian, an anthropometric historian, and as a humanistic economist exposing the Achilles hills of mainstream economics and tracing the roots of the rise of the current right-wing populist...

Measures of inequality typically rely on price indices formulated for a representative consumer, falsely assuming an identical consumption basket across households within the country. However, consumption patterns differ across households; hence, the changes in price levels might have different...

This report summarizes the findings from a survey on sustainable livelihoods of refugees in Rwanda. The survey was designed to assess the living conditions, economic status, and overall well-being of refugees, and structured around the indicators included in a self-reliance measure for refugees...

Understanding the complex and multidimensional nature of poverty is essential for designing effective and targeted policy interventions in rural Ethiopia. This study examined the determinants of multidimensional poverty in Bilate River Basin in South Ethiopia, employing cross-sectional household...

The Lao economy faces increased challenges from currency depreciation and high inflation. Economic recovery from COVID-19 has been gradual, undermined by macroeconomic instability and external factors. The combination of the need to service large external debts, high import prices, and limited...

This paper investigates the role that access to livelihood assets plays in reducing vulnerability to lower levels of well-being, especially for camp-based refugees. We develop the multidimensional vulnerability index using the 2019 Kakuma socioeconomic survey to provide a comprehensive and...