Our overarching goal is to understand critical determinants of low-income elderly Americans’ well being as measured by health status. We focus on whether and how elderly health status is affected by FSP participation, food sufficiency and other determinants. To do so we must first ascertain...

This paper uses nationally representative data to describe a monthly cycle in food expenditure and food intake by food stamp recipients. Food expenditure peaks sharply in the fIrst three days after food stamps are received. Actual food intake drops at the end of the month, for some foods and...

This paper summarizes a few key findings from a rich and growing body of research on the nature of rural poverty and, especially, the development policy implications of relatively recent findings and ongoing work. Perhaps the most fundamental lesson of recent research on rural poverty is the...

The standard theory of anti-poverty targeting assumes individual incomes cannot be observed, but statistical properties of income distribution in broadly defined groups are known. Targeting rules are then derived for the forms of transfers conditioned on group membership of individuals. In this...

This brief paper tries to highlight two important missing aspects for understanding poverty issues in developing countries. They are the economic analysis of the rural non-farm households, and the behavior of land markets. Taking South Asia as a case, this paper claims that without proper...

If the absolute number of poor people goes up, but the fraction of people in poverty comes down, has poverty gone up or gone down? The economist’s instinct, framed by population replication axioms that undergird standard measures of poverty, is to say that in this case poverty has gone down....

This commentary poses a series of progressively harder questions in the economic analysis of growth, inequality and poverty. Starting with relatively straightforward analysis of the relationship between growth and inequality, the first level of hard questions come when we ask what policies and...

This collection of essays honors a remarkable man and his work. Erik Thorbecke has made significant contributions to the microeconomic and the macroeconomic analysis of poverty, inequality and development, ranging from theory to empirics and policy. The essays in this volume display the same...