Survey data on income and expenditure is often of low quality and does not capture the volatile and irregular nature of cash flows of poor households. Financial diaries are increasingly used to improve the precision and accuracy of consumption and income estimates. In this paper we analyze...

Empirical social sciences rely heavily on surveys to measure human behavior. Previous studies show that such data are prone to random errors and systematic biases caused by social desirability, recall challenges, and the Hawthorne effect. Moreover, collecting high frequency survey data is often...

Continued population growth and increasing urbanization have led to the formation of large informal urban settlements in many developing countries in recent decades. The high prevalence of poverty, overcrowding, and poor sanitation observed in these settlements—commonly referred to as...

(english) Since the 1994 devaluation, growth has been quite strong in Mali (about 5% p.a. on average), but much weaker in terms of GDP per person (about 2.6% p.a.) due to a very high index of fecundity. Growth is still very unstable, due to a large share of agriculture in GDP and very sensitive...

The theoretical literature on pro-poor growth as well as its applications have not paid sufficient attention to the issue of varying inflation rates across the income distribution. Ignoring inflation inequality in pro-poor growth measurements can however severely bias assessments of pro-poor...

Previous poverty assessments for Burkina Faso were biased due to the neglect of some important methodological issues. This led to the so-called ‘Burkinabè Growth-Poverty-Paradox’, i.e. relatively sustained macro-economic growth, but almost constant poverty. We estimate that poverty...

Myrskylä et al. (2009) found that the relationship between the human development index (HDI) and the total fertility rate (TFR) reverses from negative (i.e., increases in HDI are associated with decreases in TFR) to positive (i.e., increases in HDI are associated with increases in TFR) at an...