Empirical social sciences rely heavily on surveys to measure human behavior. Previous studies show that such data are prone to random errors and systematic biases caused by social desirability, recall challenges, and the Hawthorne effect. Moreover, collecting high frequency survey data is often...

Using household survey data from 40 developing countries, we estimate the mortality impact of improved water and sanitation access. We find that the average mortality reduction achievable by investment in water and sanitation infrastructure is 8 and 22 deaths per 1000 children born for basic and...

Continued population growth and increasing urbanization have led to the formation of large informal urban settlements in many developing countries in recent decades. The high prevalence of poverty, overcrowding, and poor sanitation observed in these settlements—commonly referred to as...

The international debate on the question of whether shared and/or public sanitation facilities should be considered improved is still open. The concern is that a shared sanitation facility cannot be maintained in hygienic conditions when used by too many people. The analysis of 1’500 randomly...

Results of a representative survey conducted with 1’500 poor households in Uganda’s capital during November 2010 show that the majority of Kampala’s urban poor have access to on-site sanitation facilities. Despite the widespread accessibility to sanitation, the conditions of many...

It has recently been argued that the informal sector in developing countries shows a dual structure, with part of the informal sector being competitive to the formal sector and part of the informal sector being the result of market segmentation. We formulate an econometric model to test this...

Despite the recent and intense debate on how to define and measure pro-poor growth, there is one important issue which has so far not received sufficient attention: how applications of pro-poor growth measurements can appropriately take into account relative price changes, which, given the...