Bourguignon and Fields ("Poverty Measures and Anti-Poverty Policy") and Gangopadhyay and Subramanian ("Optimal Budgetary Intervention in Poverty Alleviation Schemes") have derived optimal budgetary rules for the redress of poverty through direct income transfers when poverty is measured by the...

The puzzle of why the cycle of poverty persists and upward socioeconomic mobility is so difficult has long captivated scholars and the public alike. Yet with all of the attention that has been paid to poverty, the crucial role of the law, particularly state and local law, in perpetuating poverty...

Participatory wealth rankings (PWRs) present an inclusive and inexpensive targeting method to identify poor households. They tend to be well received by participants but point to a systematically different understanding of welfare than implied by consumption-based rankings. This suggests that...

In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program's performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local-income effect on the...

Participatory wealth rankings (PWRs) present an inclusive and inexpensive targeting method to identify poor households. They tend to be well received by participants but point to a systematically different understanding of welfare than implied by consumption-based rankings. This suggests that...

There are at least two distinct and inconsistent views of poverty. These views, which can be called "poverty as desperation" and "poverty as vulnerability", have different implications about anti-poverty policy. It is important to confront the conflict between them before data can be applied to...

There are at least two distinct and inconsistent views of poverty. These views, which can be called "poverty as desperation" and "poverty as vulnerability", have different implications about anti-poverty policy. It is important to confront the conflict between them before data can be applied to...

Assessing whether distributional changes are pro-poor has become increasingly widespread in academic and policy circles. Starting from relatively general ethical axioms, this paper proposes simple graphical methods to test whether distributional changes are indeed pro-poor. Pro-poor standards...

Recent validation studies show that survey misreporting is pervasive and biases common analyses. Addressing this problem is further complicated, because validation data are usually convenience samples and access is restricted, making them more suitable to document than to solve the problem. I...

In this paper we use novel historical data on economics and social rights from the constitutions of 201 countries and an instrument variable strategy to answer two important questions. First, do economic and social rights provisions in constitutions reduce poverty? Second, does the strength of...