High inequality in incomes and assets and persistent poverty continue to plague Latin America and remain a central economic policy challenge for Latin American policymakers. At the same time, dramatically improved methods and data allow researchers to analyze these problems and how they are...

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

This paper investigates whether different types of female?headed households in Thailand and Vietnam are disadvantaged in terms of current consumption, exposure to shocks, consumption smoothing capacities, as well as vulnerability to poverty and downside risk. Using a unique panel data set of...

In this paper we construct the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) and its five subindices Family code, Civil liberties, Physical integrity, Son Preference and Ownership rights using variables of the OECD Gender, Institutions and Development database. Instead of measuring gender...

There is well-known debate about the respective role of geography versus institutions in explaining the long term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity...

This paper examines the relationship between measures of income poverty, undernourishment, childhood undernutrition, and child mortality in developing countries. While there is, as expected, a close aggregate correlation between these measures of deprivation, the measures generate some...