This is an attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap.  The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household survey for 2002, designed with research hypotheses in mind.  Enrolment is high in...

Recently, there has been a resurgence in the interest in the determinants of income inequality across countries. This paper adds to this literature by examining the role of one further explanatory variable: macroeconomic volatility. Using a cross-section of developed and developing countries, we...

Using a South African data set, the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income – measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster - enters the...

Nutrition and health are important dimensions of human well-being. Both aspects are complementary to income and deserve attention in its own right. However, there is an interrelationship between economic development and nutritional status which this study aims to investigate. We use a...

In many developing countries, the beneficiaries of transfer programmes are determined by community-based processes, based on some general targeting rules related to needs.  This opens the door for local social and political processes to impact on who gets access.  Despite increasingly large...

This paper explores the extent and nature of gender differences, by age, in household health expenditure allocation.  Using South African data, we adopt a hurdle methodology, constructing a sequence of decision stages (reporting sickness, consulting medical practitioner, incurring positive...

I use a randomised conditional cash transfer program from Indonesia to provide evidence on peer effects in consumption of poor households.  I combine this with consumption visibility data from Indonesia to examine whether peer effects in consumption differ by a good's visibility.  In line with...

Exploiting new data from a survey and behavioral experiment conducted in Peru we analyze indvidual`s preferences for securing income in old age. We identify a group that is unrationed by the mandate to save in Peru`s pension system, and draw insights from their affiliation and contribution...

This paper provides an overview of a new database that contains intellectual property data - in the form of patents and trademarks - for the population of firms registered in the UK.  The paper discusses the principal challenges involved in the construction of this integrated database and...