A national household survey for 2002, containing a specially designed module on subjective well-being, is used to estimate pioneering happiness functions in rural China. The variables predicted by economic theory to be important for happiness are relatively unimportant. The analysis suggests...

This paper examines the impact of mass media and information and communications technologies (ICT) as knowledge-based infrastructures on economic development. The results strongly suggest that both mass media and ICT penetration are negatively associated with corruption. This result holds across...

Standard poverty analysis makes statements about deprivation after the veil of uncertainty has been lifted. This implies that there is no meaningful role for risk as part of an assessment of potentially low states of well-being. In this paper, we introduce a concept of vulnerability, as a threat...

This is an attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap.  The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household survey for 2002, designed with research hypotheses in mind.  Enrolment is high in...

Econometric analyses of European datasets suggest that income aspirations increase with current income.  This finding is consistent with the adaptation hypothesis - the notion that individual aspirations adjust to reflect personal circumstances and living conditions.  We add to these existing...

The study presents recent global evidence on the transformation of economic growth to poverty reduction in developing countries, with emphasis on the role of income inequality.  The focus is on the period since the early-mid-1990s when growth in these countries as a group has been relatively...

This paper looks at some recent work on estimating quadratic variation using realised variance (RV) - that is sums of M squared returns. This econometrics has been motivated by the advent of the common availability of high frequency financial return data. When the underlying process is a...

In recent decades there have been considerable steps forward in terms of understanding poverty. This paper identifies three `meta dimensions` of poverty, which relate to: (1) depth and severity; (2) breadth and multidimensionality; and (3) time and duration. The advances that have been made in...

In this paper we study the reliability of the mixed normal asymptotic distribution of realised variance error, which we have previously derived using the theory of realised power variation. Our experiments suggest that the asymptotics is reliable when we work with the logarithmic transform of...

This paper provides limit distribution results for power variation, that is sums of powers of absolute increments, for certain types of time-changed Brownian motion and $alpha $-stable processes. Special cases of these processes are stochastic volatility models used extensively in financial...