This dissertation includes three empirical essays on development economics and one on the economics of education. The first essay (co-authored by Stephan Klasen) is a contribution to the debate surrounding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the on-going debate about what international...

The thesis consists of four essays in the broad spectrum of development economics. While the first three essays are in the sphere of poverty measurement, the fourth essay is on the topic of trade and development. In recent years, the issue of international poverty measurement gained in...

The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a...

This paper analyzes several modifications to improve a simple measure of vulnerability as expected poverty. Firstly, in order to model income, we apply distributional regression relating potentially each parameter of the conditional income distribution to the covariates. Secondly, we determine...

Empirical research on poverty today often goes beyond a focus on income to consider other dimensions of well-being. However, relatively few multidimensional poverty measures explicitly consider time, despite its particular relevance to women's double burden of paid and unpaid work. We construct...

Unterschiede in der Zeitverwendung verdeutlichen geschlechtsspezifische Armutsmuster. Diese Dissertation untersucht die Zusammenhänge zwischen Freizeit- und Einkommensarmut und zwischen Einkommensungleichheit und Kohlendioxidemissionen. Regressionen jenseits des Mittelwerts ermöglichen es, die...