Access to reliable energy is central to improvements in living standards and is a recognized Sustainable Development Goal. This study moves beyond counting the electrified households and examines the effect of the hours of electricity households receives on their welfare. We hypothesize that...

This paper investigates dynamic effects of remittances on households' poverty and income distribution. Using state-of-the-art matching techniques, we measure impacts based on counterfactual scenarios, and make a step forward by applying for the first time a dose-response function approach to...

We construct two measures of the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The first is the ratio of comprehensive wealth - defined as net worth plus the expected value of future income streams - to the wealth that would...

Using nationally representative longitudinal survey, we examine income mobility among rural Indian households over 1993-2004 and 2004-2011. We use both absolute and relative measures of mobility. Absolute measures of mobility suggest higher income mobility during 2004-2011 compared to 1993-2004,...

We propose a social welfare function to evaluate a profile of income streams and compare the welfare gain of the actual profile relative to the income profile where the individual receives his first period income in each period. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the welfare...

For most countries and years, only a few quantiles of the income distribution are available. While from this limited information, it is already a challenge to derive interesting parameter like inequality or poverty for the individual countries this becomes even more involved if one wants to...

Family economic mobility has been a policy concern for decades, with interest heating up further since the 1990s. Using data that tracks individual families' incomes during overlapping 10-year periods from 1978 through 2014, this paper investigates the relationships of factors -- family...

The economic mobility of individuals and households is of fundamental interest. While many measures of economic mobility exist, reliance on transition matrices remains pervasive due to simplicity and ease of interpretation. However, estimation of transition matrices is complicated by the...

We assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increase in global population. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical-level generalized utilitarianism...

Employing panel data techniques, we investigate the macroeconomic and institutional determinants of inequality and poverty in the EU over the period 1994–2008. We pay particular attention to the effects of macroeconomic environment, social protection and labour market institutions. The...