This research contributes to the understanding of human genetic diversity within a society as a significant determinant of its economic development. The hypothesis advanced and empirically examined in this paper suggests that there are socioeconomic trade-offs associated with genetic diversity...

A 2015 World Bank report on attainment of Millennium Development Goals concludes that the number of extremely poor has dropped substantially in all regions with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa. We assess if poverty is in the African gene by revisiting the findings of Ashraf and Galor (2013,...

We replicate Ashraf and Galor (2013) and find that its conclusions concerning the association between human genetic diversity and economic development depend substantially on coding errors and sample selection. We correct the coding errors and add or update data on genetic diversity and...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking Lorenz curves in situations where the Lorenz curves intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker ranking criteria than first-degree Lorenz dominance. To deal with such situations Aaberge (2009) introduced two...

We propose a methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space without arbitrarily aggregating income over various years or relying on arbitrarily specified poverty lines. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic dominance methodology to...