Recently several countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, have at least partially reversed their earlier moves towards compulsory defined-contribution schemes. This paper concentrates on Poland, which just reduced contributions going to the...

Recently several countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, have at least partially reversed their earlier moves towards compulsory defined-contribution schemes. This paper concentrates on Poland, which just reduced contributions going to the...

We estimate the effect of mobile money adoption on consumption smoothing, poverty and human capital investments in Tanzania. We exploit the rapid expansion of the mobile money agent network between 2010 and 2012 and combine this with idiosyncratic shocks from variation in rainfall over time and...

This paper examines the disparity in default risk between vulnerable and non-vulnerable populations in consumer lending. We merge an exhaustive registry of loans granted in the financial system with microdata on vulnerable individuals applying for social programs. We estimate the sources of this...

In this paper the class of Lower Partial Moments (LPMs) is used for measuring vulnerability as downside risk of household income in rural Cameroon. This class of established and coherent risk measures has been shown to meet a number of desirable properties. Among others, the LPMs fulfill the...

Slower growth and higher inflation can worsen poverty. By implication, maintaining macroeconomic stability is necessary to reduce poverty. When a typical aggregate demand (AD) policy for stabilization is not effective, however, its impact on poverty could be devastating as incomes of the poor...

There is a burgeoning literature on the significance and distribution of wealth in the rich world. It mainly focuses on the top. Wealth remains remarkably absent from the analysis of poverty and the redistributive effectiveness of welfare systems. This paper shows that real and financial assets...