Word searches of Google's library of digitized books suggest that there have been two “Poverty Enlightenments” since 1700, one near the end of the 18th century and the second near the end of the 20th. The historical literature suggests that only the second came with a widespread belief that...

There has been a growing interest in what have come to be termed "multidimensional indices of poverty." Advocates for these new indices correctly point out that command over market goods is not all that matters to peoples' well-being, and that other factors need to be considered when quantifying...

Randomized control trials are sometimes used to estimate the aggregate benefit from some policy or program. To address the potential bias from selective take-up, the randomization is used as an instrumental variable for treatment status. Does this (popular) method of impact evaluation help...

Development impact calls for knowledgeable development practitioners. How then do the operational staff of the largest development agency value and use its research? Is there an incentive to learn and does it translate into useful knowledge? A new survey reveals that the bulk of the World Bank's...

The challenges faced in calibrating poverty and welfare measures to objective data have long been recognized. Until recently, most economists have resisted a seemingly obvious solution, namely to ask people themselves: "Do you feel poor?" The paper studies the case for and against this approach....

Many more impact evaluations could be done, and at lower unit cost, if evaluators could avoid the need for baseline data using objective socio-economic surveys and rely instead on retrospective subjective questions on how outcomes have changed, asked post-intervention. But would the results be...

Against what standards should we judge the developing world's overall performance against poverty going forward? The paper proposes two measures, each with both "optimistic" and "ambitious" targets for 2022, 10 years from the time of writing. The first measure is absolute consumption poverty, as...

Empirical studies of tax and benefit incidence routinely ignore behavioral responses and measurement errors. This paper offers an econometric method of estimating the mean benefit withdrawal rate (marginal tax rate) allowing for incentive effects, measurement errors, and correlated latent...

Public knowledge about India's ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper problems of poor people's agency and...