This paper describes the methodology for a new World Bank Human Capital Index (HCI). The HCI combines indicators of health and education into a measure of the human capital that a child born today can expect to obtain by her 18th birthday, given the risks of poor education and health that...

This paper studies channels through which well-known benchmark indexes impact asset allocations and capital flows across countries. The study uses unique monthly micro-level data of benchmark compositions and mutual fund investments during 1996-2012. Benchmarks have important effects on equity...

Which cities have the highest risk of human and economic losses due to natural hazards? And how will urban exposure to major hazards change over the coming decades? This paper develops a global urban disaster risk index that evaluates the mortality and economic risks from disasters in 1,943...

This paper documents inequality in health and education outcomes by constructing an index of human capital disaggregated by quintiles of socioeconomic status (SES) for a sample 51 mostly low- and middle-income countries. The index measures the expected future human capital of children born...

This study constructs three indices to measure how well Brazil's young people are surviving their transition to adulthood. Youth development is difficult to quantify because of the multi-dimensionality of youth behavior. Most monitoring use individual indicators in specific sectors, making it...

The Cultural Trade Index aims to shed light on cultural trade and stimulate interest in how this little-known area can contribute to economic diversification, boost shared prosperity, and reduce extreme poverty. As the first index of its kind, the Cultural Trade Index would gather cultural trade...

Internal labor migration rates in India have been largely static and low in recent times compared with those in other countries. This is a cause for concern because internal migration for economic reasons can promote the agglomeration of economic activity in more productive locations and...

Definitions of catch-up growth in anthropometric outcomes among young children vary across studies. This paper distinguishes between catch-up in the mean of a group toward that of a healthy reference population versus catch-up within the group, associated with a narrowing of the outcome...

This paper estimates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral and North-South-East-West Highways in India on welfare, social inclusion, and environmental quality. The analysis uses district-level data for 1994-2011 and the difference-in-difference method. The results suggest that the highways...

This paper presents axiomatic arguments to make the case for distribution-sensitive multidimensional poverty measures. The commonly-used counting measures violate the strong transfer axiom which requires regressive transfers to be unambiguously poverty-increasing and they are also invariant to...