In this paper we question the consensus of using a binary crisisdefinition for empirical crisis models. We believe that the most severeshortcomings of the crisis models today are in the crisis definition rather than the explanatory variables ...

[...]This research takes Iliffe’s suggestion seriously. For the student of Sub-Saharan Africa who has decided to explore a plausible route of causationbetween nutrition and poverty, the most urgent task is to disregard the initialdiscouragement triggered by the scarcity of references. The lack...

In 1866, the Midland Railway Company demolished Agar Town,an area Victorian writers called the foulest slum in London, tomake way for the development of St Pancras railway station.Most Londoners lauded the action. But what kind of tenantsactually inhabited the area before it was destroyed, and...

This paper is motivated by the lack of any obvious relationship betweenaggregate poverty and unemployment in Great Britain. We derive aframework based on individuals’ risks of unemployment and poverty,and how these vary over the economic cycle. Analysing the BritishHousehold Panel Survey for...

We pursue an economic approach to analysing poverty. This requires a focus onthe variables that individuals can influence, such as forming or dissolving aunion or having children. We argue that this indirect approach to modellingpoverty is the right way to bring economic tools to bear on the...

[...]In the time that I have been at Health andHuman Services, one of the things I have learned is thatthe public health profession has quite a lot to teach policymakers.That is something many New Yorkers learnedearlier this decade when Dr. Margaret Hamburg was NewYork City’s health...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions;goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriatein the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based onthe EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

We address a puzzle in welfare economics - the possibility that rational people maybe simultaneously against two apparently conflicting forms of “tyranny”. In fact thetwo types of tyranny can be reconciled but at the possible cost of conflict with otherstandard welfare principles. We examine...

Economics has always had two connected faces in its Western tradition. In Adam Smith's eighteenth century, as in John Stuart Mill's nineteenth, these might be described as the science of political economy and the art of economic governance. The former aimed to describe the workings of the...

This paper discusses some aspects of the changing relationship between thestudy of economic history and development economics. Forty years ago thesubjects seemed to be quite closely linked in the sense that senior figuresstraddled both areas, the development history of the advanced countries...