According to the conventional theory of the demographic transition, mortality decline has represented the major trigger for fertility decline and eventually sustained economic development. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the HIV/AIDS epidemic has had a devastating impact on mortality, by...

Many advanced economies have recently embarked on fiscal austerity. As this has come at a time of high and rising income disparities, policy-makers have fretted about the inequality effects of fiscal consolidations. We shed new light on this issue by empirically investigating the (composition)...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recently adopted by the United Nations represent an important step to identify shared global goals for development over the next two decades. Yet, the stated goals are not as straightforward and easy to interpret as they appear on the surface. Review of...

Several papers have attempted to estimate and document the impact of conflict on numerous education, health and socioeconomic outcomes. One lesson from this research is the heterogeneity in the effect of violent conflict across and within countries. In this paper we attempt to estimate the...

Very few studies currently exist on the long-term impacts of schooling policies in developing countries. We examine the impacts—half a century later—of a mass education program conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the occupied areas during the First Indochina War....

Inequalities in the opportunity to obtain a good education in low-income countries are widely understood to be related to household resources and schooling quality. Yet, to date, most researchers have investigated the contributions of these two factors separately. This paper considers them...

The international development community has used the World Bank’s Statistical Capacity Index since its inception in 2004. The Sustainable Development Goals create new challenges for national statistical systems to produce high-quality and internationally comparable data. This paper reviews...

We offer the first study on vulnerability adaptation to subjective well-being, using rich panel data over the past two decades for Russia. We found no adaption to vulnerability for life satisfaction and subjective wealth, with longer vulnerability spells being associated with more negative...

In an unique lab-in-the-field experiment we design a novel labor market environment, the Game of Prejudice, to elicit preferences for discrimination towards the largest minority group in Europe (the Roma) at the intensive margins as well as at the extensive margins. Our unique experiment design...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in income and employment loss in many countries around the world. Yet, hardly any formal study exists on household finance and future economic expectations in poorer countries. To fill in this gap, we implemented and analyzed a web-based rapid assessment survey...