Harmonised microdata show a Gini coefficient for per capita total income of 45.3 percent in China 2002 and 33.6 percent in Russia 2003. A much larger urban to rural income gap in combination with a much smaller proportion of people living in urban areas in China are important reasons for this...

This paper examines the effect of prior participation in early childhood developmental programs, considered endogenous, upon 7-19 years olds' school enrollment and grade progression in rural North India. It hopes both to extend to less developed countries recent influential research on the...

Many economic decisions are made jointly within households. This raises the question about spouses' relative influence on joint decisions and the determinants of relative influence. Using a controlled experiment (on inter-temporal choice), we let each spouse first make individual decisions and...

Rural electrification is believed to contribute to the achievement of the MDG. In this paper, we investigate electrification impacts on different indicators. We use household data that we collected in Rwanda in villages with and without electricity access. We account for self-selection and...

Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India...

Unique residential history data with retrospective information on parental assets are used to study household wealth mobility in 141 villages in rural Bangladesh. Regression estimates of father-son correlations and analyses of intergenerational transition matrices show substantial persistence in...