We present evidence from a randomized field experiment in rural Mongolia to assess the poverty impacts of a joint-liability microcredit program targeted at women. We find a positive impact of access to group loans on female entrepreneurship and household food consumption but not on total working...

We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children. We estimate production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills as a function of...

This paper studies the paths from inequality in earnings to inequality in household consumption. We show that careful study of the evolution of the variances and covariances of earnings and consumption within cohorts across time can identify permanent and transitory shocks. We present an...

The theory of intertemporal choice predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component. Using general preference specifications and some assumptions about the nature of the random component, we provide...

How far can shoe-leather go in explaining the welfare cost of inflation? Using a unique set of microeconomic data on households, we estimate the parameters of the demand for money derived from a generalized Baumol-Tobin model. Our data set contains information on average holdings of cash, on...

We investigate partial insurance and group risk sharing in extended family networks. Our approach is based on decomposing income shocks into group aggregate and idiosyncratic components, allowing us to measure the extent to which each is insured, having accounted for public insurance programs....

On 19 December 2014, the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the Bank of England hosted a discussion forum based around Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the twenty-first century, with a number of economists from academia, public sector bodies and private sector institutions. Four speakers...

This paper describes the main cross-sectional facts on individual and household earnings, labor supply, income, consumption and wealth in Mexico in the decade of the 1990s. We use two different data sources: the Mexican Employment Survey (ENEU) and the Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey...