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...

Previous poverty assessments of Burkina Faso neglected some important methodological issues. They were therefore misleading and led to the so-called 'Burkinabè Growth--Poverty Paradox', i.e., increasing poverty despite sustained macro-economic growth and constant inequality. We estimate that...

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...

This paper investigates the patterns of capital entry barriers into informal activities and capital returns in a number of Sub-Saharan African economies using a unique micro data set on informality covering seven West-African countries. Our assessment of initial investment of micro and small...

This paper offers a unified framework linking two important debates: First, the debate about the respective roles of geography and institutions on economic development; Second, the literature on the role of technological change and economic development on agricultural intensification and land...

In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...

In many domains risky health behavior is still only poorly understood. Analysis is often plagued by incomplete data and a general lack of information. In this study; we try to understand the determinants of helmet use among motorcyclists in Delhi; a context in which road safety is very low. We...

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...