Existing program evaluation methods such as difference‐in‐difference estimators or propensity score matching are designed to examine the average impact of a program. By design they can only examine changes in a particular summary statistic of an outcome indicator, most commonly the mean or...

The recent empirical literature on household income dynamics in developing countries has tended to find considerable intertemporal economic mobility and thus inferred that a large proportion of poverty is transitory. This article introduces a statistical test which shows that these findings are...

Inequality matters for poverty reduction. However, it is often unclear what policy could do to change the distribution of income as to date there is little quantitative evidence about the household characteristics that determine the level of income inequality and its changes over time. This...

Identifying household-level welfare dynamics and associated dynamic poverty trap thresholds can have important implications for the targeting of poverty reduction policies. The small existing empirical microeconomic literature has found evidence both for and against poverty traps. Using...

Although identifying the existence and the nature of household-level poverty traps would have important implications for the design of poverty reduction policies empirical evidence is still scant. A small, but growing empirical literature has begun testing for poverty traps as thresholds in...

Understanding how households escape poverty depends on understanding how they accumulate assets over time. Therefore, identifying the degree of linearity in household asset dynamics, and specifically any potential asset poverty thresholds, is of fundamental interest to the design of poverty...