One reason that poor people may not capture the full benefit from participation in international markets is that the goods they produce tend to be subject to relatively high trade barriers. This paper analyzes market access barriers faced by households in different income deciles by matching...

Using data from Mexico, the authors study empirically the link between trade policy and individual income risk and the extent to which this varies across workers of different human capital (education) levels. They use longitudinal income data on workers to estimate time-varying individual income...

Policy makers and regulators have devoted much effort to reforms aimed at improving financial stability in response to lessons from the 2007-09 crisis. At the same time, much effort has also been directed to promoting greater financial inclusion as an enabler of equal opportunity. To some...

The paper proposes an approach to understand the relationship between inequality and economic growth obtained by shifting the analysis from the space of final achievements to the space of opportunities. To this end, it introduces a formal framework based on the concept of the Opportunity Growth...

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...

The institutional landscape of local dispute resolution in Bangladesh is rich: it includes the traditional process of shalish, longstanding and impressive civil society efforts to improve on shalish, and a somewhat less-explored provision for gram adalat or village courts. Based on a nationally...

The measurement of inequality of opportunity has hitherto not been attempted in a number of countries because of data limitations. This paper proposes two alternative approaches to circumventing the missing data problems in countries where a demographic and health survey and an ancillary...

Can changing the rules of the game affect government performance? This paper studies the impact of a simple procedural reform on the efficiency and quality of adjudication in Senegal. The reform gave judges the duty and powers to conclude pre-trial proceedings within a four-month deadline. The...

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. This study uses two new metadata...