Households in developing countries are frequently hit by severe idiosyncratic and covariate shocks resulting in high consumption volatility. A household's currently observed poverty status might therefore not be a good indicator of the household's general poverty risk, or in other words its...

In this paper we analyze if an `urban mortality penalty\' exists for today\'s developing countries, repeating the history of industrialized nations during the 19th century. We analyze the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) of 19 Sub-Saharan African countries for differences in child and adult...

With about five children born per woman and a population growth rate of 2.5 per cent per year, sub-Saharan Africa has been the world's fastest growing region over the last decade. Economists have often argued that high fertility rates are mainly driven by women's demand for children (and not by...

Households in developing countries are frequently hit by severe idiosyncratic and covariate shocks resulting in high consumption volatility. A household's currently observed poverty status might therefore not be a good indicator of the household's general poverty risk, or in other words its...

Despite relatively sustained economic growth in at least parts of Sub-Saharan Africa over the past twenty years, the fertility transition has not much advanced in most countries in that region. We explore whether the lack of structural change can explain this slow transition. For this end, we...

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...

Despite the recent and intense debate on how to define and measure pro-poor growth, there is one important issue which has so far not received sufficient attention: how applications of pro-poor growth measurements can appropriately take into account relative price changes, which, given the...

It has recently been argued that the informal sector in developing countries shows a dual structure, with part of the informal sector being competitive to the formal sector and part of the informal sector being the result of market segmentation. We formulate an econometric model to test this...

An increasing interest in poverty dynamics has lately also led to an extensive literature on the analysis of chronic poverty. Based on Amartya Sen?s groundbreaking work on capabilities and functionings static poverty measures have long used non-income indicators. In contrast, measures of poverty...

It has been recently argued that the informal sector of the labor market in a developing economy shows a dual structure with one part of it being competitive to the formal sector and another part being the result of market segmentation. To test this hypothesis we formulate an econometric model...