Purchasing power parities (PPPs) for Ramp;D expenditure in 19 manufacturing industries are developed for France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom relative to the United States for the years 1997 and 1987. These PPPs are based on Ramp;D input prices for specific cost...

We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely-matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by the International Comparisons Program...

Rather than charging direct fees, banks often charge implicitly for their services via interest spreads. As a result, much of bank output has to be estimated indirectly. In contrast to current statistical practice, dynamic optimizing models of banks argue that compensation for bearing systematic...

We describe the theory and practice of real GDP comparisons across countries and over time. Effective with version 8, the Penn World Table (PWT) will be taken over by the University of California, Davis and the University of Groningen, with continued input from Alan Heston at the University of...

Does knowledge about antipoverty programs spread quickly within poor communities or are there significant frictions, such as due to social exclusion? We combine longitudinal and intra-household observations in estimating the direct knowledge gain from watching an information movie in rural...

We propose an index of the adequacy of home environments for protection (HEP) from COVID-19, and we compare our index across developing countries using data for one million sampled households from the latest Demographic and Health Surveys. We find that prevailing WHO recommendations for...

Evidence on the implementation of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act suggests that the available work is often rationed by local leaders in poor areas, and that this is an important factor limiting the scheme's impact on poverty. The paper offers explanations for this empirical...

Ethnic riots broke out in Malaysia in 1969, prompting a national effort at affirmative action favoring the poorer (majority) of “Bumiputera” (mainly Malays). Since then, Malaysia's official poverty measures indicate one of the fastest long-term rates of poverty reduction in the world, due to...

Antipoverty policies assume that targeting poor households suffices in reaching poor individuals. We question this assumption. Our comprehensive assessment for sub-Saharan Africa reveals that undernourished women and children are spread widely across the household wealth and consumption...

The paper provides the first assessment of: (i) America's progress in lifting the lower bound—the floor—of the distribution of real income; (ii) whether the country's largest antipoverty program, SNAP (“food stamps”), helped do so. An operational method of estimating the floor is...