A model is developed for peasant households in land abundant areas who choose between two technologies for land preparation: a manual one and one using draught animals. For draught a minimum number of animals is required so that a technological non convexity exists. It follows that certain...

We examine linkages between aggregate household income, distribution of that income, and aggregate cross-country expenditure patterns. We are able to decompose income effects into international income dispersion effects (from variations in average income) and national income dispersion (income...

We ask individuals for their reservation price of a specified lotteryand deduce their Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion.This allows direct testing of common hypotheses on risk attitudes inthree datasets. We find that risk aversion indeed fallswith income and wealth. Entrepreneurs are less...

We analyze the empirical violation of the Hillman condition, a necessary and sufficient condition for the correspondence between comparative advantage and pre-trade relative prices. Our comprehensive data set allows us to investigate the Hillman condition for virtually all countries of the...

With panel data important issues can be resolved that can not beaddressed with cross--sectional data. A major drawback is that paneldata suffer from more severe missing data problems. Adding a sampleconsisting of new units randomly drawn from the original populationas replacements for units who...

Detecting heterogeneity within a population is crucial in many economic and financial applications. Econometrically, this requires a credible determination of multimodality in a given data distribution. We propose a straightforward yet effective technique for mode inference in discrete data...

This paper analyses the relationship between growth patterns, poverty, and inequality in Brazil during its globalization process, focusing on the role played by the labour market and social programmes. Methodologically, the paper makes two contributions to the literature. One is the proposal of...

This paper looks into the interrelation between economic growth, inequality, and poverty. Using the notion of pro-poor growth, this study examines to what extent the poor benefit from economic growth. First, various approaches to defining and measuring pro-poor growth are scrutinized using a...

Over the past 20 years, aggregate measures of global inequality have changed little even if significant structural changes have been observed. High growth rates of China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while the stagnation in many African countries caused them to fall behind. Using the...

This paper presents a model allowing one to analyze the joint determination of inequality, taxes, human capital and growth. We consider the political economy of redistribution between three income groups in a dynamic economy. The paper seeks to explain the effect of corruptibility (exemptions)...