This paper is motivated by two stylized facts about poverty in Africa: female-headed households tend to be poorer, and poverty has been falling in the aggregate since the 1990s. These facts raise two questions: How have female-headed households fared? And what role have they played in Africa's...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze and derive simple budget rules in the face of volatile public revenue from natural resources in a low-income country like Niger. The simulation results suggest three policy lessons or rules of thumb. When a resource...

Absent actual panel household survey data, this paper constructs, for the first time, synthetic panel data for more than 20 countries accounting for two-thirds of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this process, the analysis employs repeated cross sections that span, on average, a six-year...

The effects of urban transport policies on household welfare are a broadly understudied topic in developing countries. This paper analyzes the distributional effects of a newly established bus rapid transit system in Barranquilla, Colombia. The paper uses pooled cross-sectional household survey...

To comprehend how development really happens, it is necessary to understand the evolution of its drivers and their relationship with individuals' income. This paper analyzes the expansion of access to education and basic services in Latin America and its association with the evolution of incomes...

Do poor households shop in a way that leaves money on the table? A simple way to maximize consumption, conditional on available cash, is to avoid regularly purchasing small amounts of nonperishable goods when bulk discounts are available at modestly larger quantities. Using two-week transaction...

Intra-household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design, but there is very little evidence. The current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels, as well as to the misclassification...

This paper uses nationally representative panel data and a combination of econometric approaches, to explore linkages between rural non-farm activities (wage and self-employment) and household welfare in rural Malawi. The paper analyzes the average treatment effects and distributional effects on...

This paper examines the exposure, vulnerability, and ability of households in Colombo, Sri Lanka, to respond to floods, and brings out significant policy implications. The study used detailed questionnaire-based surveys to obtain data on households, to understand the vulnerability and impacts of...

This paper studies long-term impacts of violent conflict, to provide insights into the costs of conflict and policies to prevent conflict relapse. The findings link evidence on the contemporaneous effects of conflict with its persistent impact, especially by combining multiple data sources such...