We compare three approaches to linking macro models with representative households and micro household income data in terms of their implications for measuring the poverty and distributional effects of poverty reduction strategies. These approaches are a simple micro- accounting method, an...

Whereas life expectancy continues to increase in most industrialized countries, many developing and transition countries are today confronted with decreases in life expectancy. Usual measures employed to compare welfare over time and space fail to deal with such demographic change and may lead...

Local beer breweries in Burkina Faso absorb a considerable amount of urban woodfuel demand. We assess the woodfuel savings caused by the adoption of improved brewing stoves by these micro-breweries and estimate the implied welfare effects through the woodfuel market on private households as well...

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

In this thesis I examine the welfare and social consequences associated with one economic shock and two policy interventions in Mexico. I use non-experimental approaches that exploit increased data availability as well as in-depth knowledge of the institutional background and show how germane...