This paper documents and explains the near-permanent banking stress African countries have experienced during the last 20 years. The central hypothesis is that banking stress comes predominantly from unbooked losses and that the level of unbooked losses a banking system can accumulate depends on...

The historical pattern of the demographic transition suggests that fertility declines follow mortality declines, followed by a rise in human capital accumulation and economic growth. The HIV/AIDS epidemic threatens to reverse this path. A recent paper by Young (2005), however, suggests that...

Proxy-means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information. In a now widely-used version, a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy-means test score based on chosen covariates, which is then implemented for targeting out-of-sample. In this paper, the...