Child or early marriage is recognized as an important development and human rights issue that affects girls especially in many developing countries. The practice has been linked to psychological, health, and education risks. These negative impacts explain why in many countries child marriage has...

It has long been argued that faith-inspired health facilities serve the poor in priority in sub-Saharan Africa, in part by being located in remote and poor areas where the reach of government services may remain limited. Unfortunately, proper empirical evidence to back up such claims is rarely...

This article provides a simple framework to analyze the determinants of targeting performance of utility tariffs and applies it to data on electricity in Cape Verde, Rwanda, and Sao Tome and Principe. While most indicators of benefit incidence are silent as of why subsidies are targeted the way...

A key component of Poverty Reduction Strategies in developing countries consists in assessing the needs of the population in terms of access to basic services such as education, health care, and basic infrastructure. Using Demographic and Health Surveys from 40 countries, this note shows that...

This note applies tools from the stochastic dominance literature on poverty to environmental data in order to test in a robust way whether over-consumption and thereby depletion of natural resources is increasing over time. The method is illustrated with country data on per capita CO2 emissions.

This article provides a simple framework to analyze the determinants of targeting performance of utility tariffs and applies it to data on electricity in Cape Verde, Rwanda, and Sao Tome and Principe. While most indicators of benefit incidence are silent as of why subsidies are targeted the way...

One feature that potentially makes the Fama-French (FF) three-factor model less appealing than the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is the complexity of the FF model versus simplicity of the CAPM. This motivates us to construct simple benchmarks for FF factors in Japanese market by using four...

Income inequality typically declines with the length of time taken into account for measurement. This note derives an exact analytical relationship between the accounting period and inequality as measured by the Gini index. The formal relationship is similar to the decomposition of the...

Despite water being subsidized in most developing countries, poorer households end up paying more per unit of consumption because they are generally not connected to the network and, as a result, are forced to buy water from public fountains or street vendors at a higher price. In this note we...

The availability of better data on time use in developing countries makes it important to provide tools for analyzing such data. Conceptually, time poverty can be understood as the fact that some individuals do not have enough time for rest and leisure after taking into account the time spent...