It is not known to what extent welfare measures result from seasonal and geographical price differences rather than from differences in living standards across households. Using data from Rwanda in 1983, we show that the change in mean living standard indicators caused by local and seasonal...

This case study exploits matched firm–employee Tunisian data in order to underline the role played by within-firm human capital in worker remuneration. The estimated returns to human capital in wage equations remain unchanged when the dummies representing firm heterogeneity are replaced in the...

Under perfect observation of incomes, designing such scheme boils down to solving an optimisation program under constraints, which can be achieved with well-defined methods. In contrast, when incomes cannot be perfectly observed, the schemes are usually based on predictions of living standards...

In this paper we study how the Huber estimator can be adapted to the presence of endogeneity in a two stage equations setting similar to that of 2SLS. We propose an estimation procedure that is at the same time relatively (i) simple, (ii) robust and (iii) efficient. Moreover, we deal with the...

This paper introduces a new methodology to target direct transfers against poverty. Our method is based on observable correlates and on estimation methods that focus on the poor. Using data from Tunisia, we estimate ‘focused’ transfer schemes that improve anti-poverty targeting performances....

Spatial price dispersion varies because of climatic fluctuations, marketimperfections, economic growth or economic policies. These variations areoften neglected in poverty studies.In this paper, we propose a simple simulation formula to assess the effecton poverty of a change in the spatial mean...

From Tunisian matched worker-firm data in 1999, we study the returns to human capital in two leading manufacturing sectors. Workers in the IMMEE benefit from higher returns to human capital than their counterparts in the Textile-clothing industry. In the IMMEE firms, low wage workers experience...

In general models, the strong quasi-concavity of the objective function, which is sufficient for theoretical properties of demands in consumer theory, is often arbitrary and weaker global concavity conditions are desirable. We propose a new global concavity condition that implies, for models...

We introduce an analytical framework for welfare analysis that accounts for changes in the joint distribution of prices and incomes by using parametric formulae of poverty and inequality measures. We propose statistical indicators for the levels, variabilities and a statistical link of price...