All over the world, people are prevented from participating fully in society through mechanisms that go beyond the structural and institutional barriers identified by rational choice theory (poverty, exclusion by law or force, taste-based and statistical discrimination, and externalities from...

How does law change society? In the rational actor model, law affects behavior only by changing incentives and information -- the command and coordination function of law. Under the view that humans are social animals, law is also a guidepost for social norms that regulate behavior -- the...

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...

Poverty is an indicator of paramount importance for gauging the socioeconomic well-being of a population. Especially during or after a shock, poverty estimates are invaluable for assessing the severity of the impact and for identifying which parts of the population were most affected. The...

Misreporting is a well-known challenge for researchers in social sciences. This issue is especially prevalent if incentives for misreporting exist, for example, to claim certain benefits or hide illegal behavior. Internally displaced persons are a population that is highly dependent on aid...

Small area poverty maps allow for the design of policies based on spatial differences in welfare. They are typically estimated based on a consumption survey reporting on poverty and a census providing the spatial disaggregation. This paper presents a new method which allows for the estimation of...

Interventions in highly insecure and fragile contexts are always confronted with the latent risk of not being able to implement the program as intended. Despite its high policy relevance, little is known about the impacts of program disruption or cancellation on beneficiaries. This study uses...

Enumeration areas are the operational geographic units for the collection, dissemination, and analysis of census data and are often used as a national sampling frame for various types of surveys. Traditionally, enumeration areas are created by manually digitizing small geographic units on...

Somalia is highly data-deprived, leaving policy makers to operate in a statistical vacuum. To overcome this challenge, the World Bank implemented wave 2 of the Somali High Frequency Survey to better understand livelihoods and vulnerabilities and, especially, to estimate national poverty...

The High Frequency South Sudan Survey, implemented by the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with the World Bank, conducted several waves of representative surveys across seven of the ten former states between 2015 and 2017. These surveys provided a long overdue update to...