In this paper we focus on the timing of marriages of women, whose marriages are associated with bride wealth payments, which are transfers from (the family of) the groom to the bride's family. Unmarried daughters could therefore be considered assets who, at times of need, can be cashed in. We...

Disentangling age, period, and cohort effects in explaining health trends is crucial to assess future prevalences of health disorders. The identification problem -- age, period, and cohort effects are perfectly linearly related -- is tackled by modeling cohort and period effects using lifetime...

This paper describes the origins of the logistic function, its adoption in bio-assay, and its wider acceptance in statistics. Its roots spread far back to the early 19th century; the survival of the term logistic and the wide application of the device have been determined decisively by the...

Participatory wealth rankings (PWRs) present an inclusive and inexpensive targeting method to identify poor households. They tend to be well received by participants but point to a systematically different understanding of welfare than implied by consumption-based rankings. This suggests that...

This paper uses cross-country micro-aggregated data on rm dynamics and productivity from the ECB CompNet database to provide empirical evidence on factor reallocation in the EU. The analysis finds that reallocation is towards more productive firms although the magnitude varies across countries...

The literature that tests for U-shaped relationships using panel data, such as those between pollution and income or inequality and growth, reports widely divergent (parametric and non-parametric) empirical findings. We explain why lack of identification lies at the root of these differences. To...

Measurement of inequity in health care delivery has focused on the extent to which health care utilisation is or is not distributed according to need, irrespective of income. Studies using cross-sectional data have proposed various ways of measuring and standardizing for need, but inevitably...