This paper studies income poverty among the 50+ population in 10 EU countries using newly collected data from the SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) project. A measure of the household's disposable annual income is used. Relative income poverty range from 10 percent (in...

We study the ability of banks and merchants to influence the consumer's payment instrument choice. Consumers participate in payment card networks to insure themselves against three types of shocks

We analyze how a benevolent, privately-informed government agency would optimally release information about the economy's growth rate when the agents hold heterogeneous beliefs. We model two types of agents: "trusting" and "distrustful." The former has a prior that is identical to that of the...

The classic fair cake-cutting problem [Steinhaus, 1948] is extended by introducing geometric constraints on the allocated pieces. Specifically, agents may demand to get their share as a square or a rectangle with a bounded length/width ratio. This is a plausible constraint in realistic...

Research into multidimensional poverty has gathered momentum in the last half decade, most notably in the aftermath of the global food and financial crises of 2007-2008. It has gained further momentum since the UNDP-OPHI launched the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR) and more recently as part...

What has happened to inequality between and within countries since 1990? In this paper we explore who have been the winners and losers from global growth since 1990. We find that falls in total global inequality in the last 30 years are predominantly attributable to rising prosperity in China....

Several post-Soviet states have introduced policies to improve the relative economic, political or social position of formerly disadvantaged populations. Using one example of such policies - "Kazakhisation" in Kazakhstan - we investigate their impact on the comparative earnings of two directly...

Kosovo is a war-torn corner of the former Yugoslavia, where a civil war between ethnic Albanians and ethnic Serbs raged during most of the 1990s. We examine the incidence and depth of poverty and some of its correlates in post-conflict Kosovo using the Living Standards Measurement Survey.

This paper begins with an examination of various ways of measuring unemployment and, borrowing ideas from the poverty measurement literature, proposes four new general unemployment indices. The first of these is parallel to the Sen poverty index; the second, to the Sen index's generalization by...

This paper uses data from the 1993-2001 March Current Population Survey to estimate the extent to which child living arrangements, parental work patterns, and immigration attributes shape racial and ethnic variation in child poverty. Results from multivariate analyses and a standardization...