Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper we build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data can allow...

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion motivates individuals to engage in...

In this paper, the authors investigate the determinants of weight for leisure in preferences. First, using a dynamic general equilibrium model, they back out the weight for leisure for an unbalanced panel of 52 countries over the period from 1950 to 2009. Then, the authors perform several panel...

Between 1991 and 1997 West Germany spent on average about 3.6bn euro per year on public sector sponsored training programmes for the unemployed. We base our empirical analysis on a new administrative database that plausibly allows for selectivity correction by microeconometric matching methods....

In this paper, we examine the empirical relationship between current account balance and output volatility in a panel data framework using annual data from 185 countries over the period from 1950 to 2010. In our static panel data analysis, we find that a larger current account deficit is...