"Theories of relative deprivation predict negative welfare effects when friends and neighbors become better-off. Other theories point to likely positive benefits. The authors encompass both views within a single model, which motivates their tests using a survey for Malawi that collected data on...

"Can self-assessed health be relied on to identify the true socioeconomic gradients in health status? The self-assessed health of Russian adults in 2002 shows remarkably little gradient with respect to economic welfare. The authors document this finding and assess its robustness to the...

"The immediate welfare costs of an economywide crisis can be high, but are there also lasting impacts? And are they greater in some geographic areas than others? Ravallion and Lokshin study Indonesia's severe financial crisis of 1998. They use 10 national surveys spanning 1993--2002, each...

In theory it is possible that a vulnerable household will never recover from a sufficiently large but short-lived shock to its income, which could explain the persistent poverty that has emerged in many transition economies. But this study for Hungary shows that, in general, households bounce...

Attitudes toward redistribution of wealth in Russia tend to reflect expectations of future mobility, in both directions. Few Russians expected rising living standards in the 1990s, and most expected a decline in living standards, so there was strong demand for redistribution, even among those...

"The authors use data from three waves of the India National Family Health Survey to explore the relationship between the month of birth and the health outcomes of young children in India. They find that children born during the monsoon months have lower anthropometric scores compared with...

"This paper assesses the impact of work-related migration by males on the labor market behavior of females in Nepal. Using data from the 2004 Nepal household survey, the authors apply the Instrumental Variable Full Information Maximum Likelihood method to account for unobserved factors that...

"The authors use data from a large nationally representative survey in Russia to analyze the distributional and welfare implications of draft avoidance as a common response to Russia's highly unpopular conscription system. They develop a simple theoretical model that describes household...

"Ravallion and Lokshin use Morocco's national survey of living standards to measure the short-term welfare impacts of prior estimates of the price changes attributed to various trade policy reforms for cereals - the country's main foodstaple. They find small impacts on mean consumption and...