This paper examines the economic and social implications of the current system of residential electricity subsidies in Pakistan, and assesses the potential to improve the system's outcomes through alternative targeting and program design. The analysis is multi-disciplinary in nature, drawing on...

This paper measured the extent to which households in Madagascar adjust children’s school attendance in order to cope with exogenous shocks to household income, assets and labour supply. Our analysis was based on a unique data set with 10 years of recall data on school attendance and household...

This paper intends to inform the effort of the Sri Lankan government to reform the targeting efficacy of its social protection programs, in particular, Samurdhi, which currently distributes benefits based on self-reported income. The paper develops a proxy means test for Sri Lanka based on the...

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 household-level poverty dynamics would have important implications for poverty reduction policies empirical evidence is still scant. This paper employs a novel semiparametric panel data estimator that combines the advantages of estimation methods in the existing literature...

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...

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...