As the Chinese Communist Party has loosened its grip in a more market-oriented economy, why have membership and the economic benefits of joining risen? We use three national household surveys over 11 years to answer this question for wages in urban China. Individual demand for Party membership...

This study examines income dynamics for a panel of households resettled on former white-owned farms in the aftermath of Zimbabwe's independence. There are four core findings: (i) over a 13-year period (1983-96) there has been an impressive accumulation of assets and a dramatic increase of crop...

This study provides an introduction to this special issue of The Journal of Development Studies on economic mobility and poverty dynamics in developing countries. In addition to providing a conceptual framework, it outlines how the contributions fit into the extant literature. A series of...

Increasing attention is now being paid to poverty dynamics in developing countries. This work links the extent to which households smooth consumption or smooth assets given income shocks, the empirical evidence on the churning of households in and out of poverty, and the possibility that...

What keeps some people persistently poor, even in the context of relative high growth? In this article, we explore this question using a 15-year longitudinal data set from Ethiopia. We compare the findings of an empirical growth model with those derived from a model of the determinants of...

This paper assesses the impact of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Nets Programme (PSNP), the largest social protection programme in sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa. Using propensity score matching techniques, we find that the programme has little impact on participants on average, due in...

A survey of rural migrants employed in enterprises in four Chinese cities is analysed to answer the following questions. Are the productive characteristics of migrants rewarded in the urban labour market? How do migrants compare with non-migrants in their productive characteristics, occupational...

Why is it that couples who have a son or whose last child is a son earn higher conditional income? To solve this curious case we tell a detective story: evidence of a phenomenon to be explained, a parade of suspects, a process of elimination from the enquiry, and then the denouement. Given the...

The impact of education on farmers' attitudes toward endogenous risk (measured using an attitude survey instrument) is estimated with household data from rural Ethiopia. Education of the household head is found to decrease risk-aversion. Next, the effects of education and risk attitudes on...

The paper presents subjective well-being functions for urban and rural China, based on a national household survey for 2002. Whereas the vast income disparity between urban and rural households is confirmed, it is found that, remarkably, rural households report higher subjective well-being than...