Despite a recent surge in the number of studies attempting to measure inequality of opportunity in various countries, methodological differences have so far prevented meaningful international comparisons. This paper presents a comparison of ex-ante measures of inequality of economic opportunity...

Studies of female business leaders and economic performance are rarely conducted with worldwide observational data, and with considerations on the underlying cultural, institutional, and business environment. This paper uses worldwide, firm-level data from more than 100 countries to study how...

Expectations of future socioeconomic mobility are an important determinant of cur- rent policy preferences. But how may these expectations be formed? Using Life in Transition survey data for a large set of transition economies and several Western European countries, this paper examines the link...

This paper studies welfare dynamics, especially changes associated with middle-class status in countries in the Middle East and North Africa, before and after the Arab Spring transitions, using objective and subjective welfare measures. Absent panel data, the analysis employs state-of-the-art...

This paper introduces a variety of concepts and methods to examine living standards improvements in Nepal in a dynamic perspective. Using data from three rounds of Nepal Living Standards Surveys conducted in the past two decades, together with data from a nationally representative survey that...

In the past decade, Turkey has experienced a notable level of poverty reduction at all levels (extreme poor, poor, and vulnerable). The steady decline in poverty was also resilient to the decline in gross domestic product per capita growth during the crisis. However, although poverty convergence...

Despite significant improvements in per capita expenditures and a marked decline in poverty over the 2000s, a large fraction of Eastern Europe and Central Asia's population reports their economic situation in the late 2000s to be worse than in 1989. This paper uses data from the Life in...

This paper relaxes the single-factor model of intergenerational educational mobility and analyzes heterogeneous effects of family background on children?s education in villages, with a focus on the role of nonfarm occupations. The analysis uses data from rural China that cover three generations,...