This article examines the links that have recently been studied between poverty, high fertility and undernourishment, on the one hand, and degradation of the local environmental-resource base and civic disconnection, on the other, in poor countries. An account is offered of a number of pathways...

This paper is about measuring social well-being and evaluating policy. Part I is concerned with the links between the two, while Parts II and III, respectively, are devoted to the development of appropriate methods of measuring and evaluating. In Part II (Sections 4-7) I identify a minimal set...

This report estimates housing-cost-earnings differentials across labour market areas in Britain. We show that quality-adjusted housing costs rise on average, one for one with the skill-adjusted earnings of the average working household. However, the relationship is Ushaped, with relatively high...

Interactions between economic development and financial development are studied by looking at the roles of financial institutions in selecting R&D projects (including for both imitation and innovation). Financial development is regarded as the evolution of the financing regimes. The...

How much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling? We contribute to the development accounting literature by describing a nonparametric upper bound on the increase in output that can be generated by more schooling. The advantage of our approach...

We argue that identification problems bedevil most applied spatial research. Spatial econometrics solves these problems by deriving estimators assuming that functional forms are known and by using model comparison techniques to let the data choose between competing specifications. We argue that...

Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason why poor people remain poor. This paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion program to provide empirial evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian Central Bank mandated that a commercial bank can open a branch in...

Spatial econometrics has been criticized by some economists because some model specifications have been driven by data-analytic considerations rather than having a firm foundation in economic theory. In particular this applies to the so-called W matrix, which is integral to the structure of...

Most of the 60+ developing countries that have established social funds (SFs) are decentralising their governments as well. But the question of how to tailor SFs - originally a highly centralised model - for a decentralising context has received relatively little attention in the literature. We...