The thesis consists of four essays in the broad spectrum of development economics. While the first three essays are in the sphere of poverty measurement, the fourth essay is on the topic of trade and development. In recent years, the issue of international poverty measurement gained in...

This paper re-enters the contested discussion surrounding the Indian Enigma, the high prevalence of chronic undernutrition in India relative to sub-Saharan Africa. Jayachandran & Pande argue that the key to the Indian enigma lies in the worse treatment of higher birth order children,...

Um Armut zu bekämpfen, muss die menschliche Entwicklung gestärkt werden. Allerdings werden heute 250 Millionen Kinder unter 5 Jahren in Ländern mit niedrigem und mittlerem Einkommen wahrscheinlich nicht ihr volles Entwicklungspotenzial erreichen. Um Hindernisse für eine optimale menschliche...

Despite the recent economic growth in many countries on the African continent, the region has seen a slow fertility transition. In this study, we explore whether the lack of structural economic change can explain this slow fertility transition. We create a unique panel data set combining...

We investigate the geographical and socioeconomic determinants of childhood undernutrition in Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, three neighboring countries in Southern Africa using the 1992 Demographic and Health Surveys. We estimate models of undernutrition jointly for the three countries to...

Anthropometric, mortality, and population data presented by Svedberg (1990) in this journal suggested a slight anti-male bias in undernutrition in sub-Saharan Africa. This article re-analyses some of the same data and supplements them with more recent findings. In contrast to Svedberg's results,...

Using changes in the possession of household assets over the past 20 years, several recent papers have argued that economic performance in Arica was substantially better than suggested by national income data and income poverty statistics, who suffer from well-known weaknesses. We scrutinize...

In a recent paper in the Review of Economic Studies, Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray (Anderson and Ray, 2010) develop and apply a new "flow" measure of "missing women" to estimate the extent of gender bias in mortality in developing countries. Contrary to the existing literature, they find that...