Economics blogs represent a significant change in the way research on development economics is discussed and disseminated, yet little is known about the impact of this new medium. Using surveys of development researchers and practitioners, along with experimental and nonexperimental techniques,...

Household expenditure surveys are used to examine the effects of the Mexican peso crisis on household consumption. The main smoothing mechanism was a change in the composition of consumption, with households reducing semidurable spending to maintain basic food levels. This article provides a...

Recent theoretical literature in development economics has shown that nonconvex production technologies can result in low-growth poverty traps. This article uses detailed microenterprise surveys in Mexico to examine the empirical evidence for these nonconvexities at low levels of capital stock....

The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. However, estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and nonrandom attrition from...

The impacts of international emigration and remittances on incomes and poverty in sending areas are increasingly studied with household survey data. But comparing households with and without emigrants is complicated by a triple-selectivity problem: first, households self-select into emigration;...

I examine the changes in poverty and inequality in South Africa during the first 5 years following the end of the apartheid era. First, I construct new, comparable consumption aggregates for 1995 and 2000. Second, using the “cost-of basic-needs” approach, I derive lower-bound (R322, in South...

I examine the changes in poverty and inequality in South Africa during the first 5 years following the end of the apartheid era. First, I construct new, comparable consumption aggregates for 1995 and 2000. Second, using the "cost-of basic-needs" approach, I derive lower-bound (R322, in South...