All Papers

Stanislav Kolenikov, Gustavo Ángeles

The last several years have seen a growth in the number of publications in economics that use principal component analysis (PCA) in the area of welfare studies. This paper explores the ways discrete data can be incorporated into PCA. The effects of discreteness of the observed variables on the PCA a...

Ananya Roy

Winner of the 2011 Paul Davidoff award! This is a book about poverty but it does not study the poor and the powerless; instead it studies those who manage poverty. It sheds light on how powerful institutions control "capital," or circuits of profit and investment, as well as "truth," or authoritativ...

Mariapia Mendola

Amartya Sen

Famines often take place in situations of moderate to good food availability, without any significant decline of food supply per head. The paper presents an alternative approach to famines, which does not concentrate on availability, but on people's ability to command food through legal means availa...

Dennis Egger, Edward Miguel, Shana S. Warren, Ashish Shenoy et al.

Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and sub...

Martha C. Nussbaum, Jonathan Glover

BL Distinguished editors and contributors BL Addresses questions of some urgency for the question of women's quality of life BL Inter-disciplinary, ranging over philosophy, economics, political science, anthropology, law and sociology BL Combines theory with case-studies BL Accessible to non-special...

Mead Cain

Relative to other approaches and emphases -- the value of childrens labor for example -- the potential importance of environmentally and socially determined risk as a source of derived demand for children in poor agrarian settings has been largely overlooked. Using frequency of distress sale of land...

Bina Agarwal

AbstractIn recent years, the concept of 'food sovereignty' has gained increasing ground among grassroots groups, taking the form of a global movement. But there is no uniform conceptualization of what food sovereignty constitutes. Indeed, the definition has been expanding over time. It has moved fro...

Rachel Heath, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from fact...

Anthony Shorrocks

Attempts have recently been made to assign inequality contributions to various components of income. This paper discusses the issues involved in such assignments and highlights the problems that follow from having a number of possible decomposition rules. U. S. data on the distribution of family inc...

S. Amer Ahmed, Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Thomas W. Hertel

Extreme climate events could influence poverty by affecting agricultural productivity and raising prices of staple foods that are important to poor households in developing countries. With the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events predicted to change in the future, informed policy design...

Binayak Sen

Mark M. Pitt, Shahidur R. Khandker

Group-based lending programs for the poor have become a focus of attention in the development community over the last several years. To date, there has been no comprehensive investigation of their impact on household behavior that has been sufficiently attentive to issues of endogeneity and self-sel...

Deborah Balk

This paper examines the relationship between women's status and fertility in two regions of rural Bangladesh. Based on individual and household-level survey data, women's status is measured through four constructs. The covariates of these four aspects of women's status vary considerably and confirm ...