Abstract The standard model of essential heterogeneity, whereby program take up depends on unobserved costs and benefits of take up, is generalized to allow the source of latent heterogeneity to influence counterfactual outcomes. The standard instrumental variables (IV) estimator is shown to...

Abstract We test for the existence of poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth using a nonlinear dynamic panel data model of household incomes allowing for endogenous attrition. Our estimates for Hungary and Russia in the 1990s reveal significant nonlinearity in the dynamics, consistent...

The crisis in the developed world has spilled over into the lives of the world’s poorest, who are particularly vulnerable even to the smallest income shocks.

This article provides an introduction to the concepts and methods of impact evaluation. The author provides an intuitive explanation in the context of a concrete application. The article takes the form of a short story about a fictional character's on-the-job training in evaluation. Ms. Speedy...

Data from China's national rural and urban household surveys are used to measure and explain the welfare impacts of changes in goods and factor prices attributable to accession to the World Trade Organization. The price changes are estimated separately using a general equilibrium model to...

The article assesses the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program was intended to provide direct income support for families with dependents and whose head had become unemployed because of the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are...

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...

The article presents the first major update of the international $1 a day poverty line, proposed in World Development Report 1990: Poverty for measuring absolute poverty by the standards of the world's poorest countries. In a new and more representative data set of national poverty lines, a...

The extent to which India's poor have benefited from the country's economic growth has long been debated. A new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, including a 15-year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s, is used to examine that issue....

Many more impact evaluations could be done, and at lower unit cost, if evaluators could avoid the need for baseline data using objective socio-economic surveys and rely instead on retrospective subjective questions on how outcomes have changed, asked post-intervention. But would the results be...