Using an extension of Lucas¡¯ model of endogenous growth with education externality, we show that an environmental tax may increase growth. This is because the tax makes physical capital accumulation less attractive, thereby correcting for the underinvestment by agents in human capital.

Income variablity is likely to increase wage inequality if poorer households are more vulnerable to shocks. Using a simple method to estimate risk-adjusted measures of wage inequality and data from Mexico, this note shows that safety nets could offset a good part of the impact of risk aversion...

This note applies tools from the stochastic dominance literature on poverty to environmental data in order to test in a robust way whether over-consumption and thereby depletion of natural resources is increasing over time. The method is illustrated with country data on per capita CO2 emissions.

Under price ceilings and quality floors for agricultural inputs in cash crop sectors in developing countries where credit markets are weak, imperfect information on the ability of farmers to pay for their inputs at the end of the cropping season may lead the decentralized production of those...

International Financial Institutions have advocated the privatization of integrated agricultural monopsonies in developing countries with the hope that competition between private firms under a contract farming system would reduce inefficiencies in production and enable farmers to obtain a...

The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of public transfers on poverty in Canada and the US using the Luxemburg Income Study data base. The main difficulty is the fact that the impact of any one given transfer on poverty depends on whether one considers the other transfers as part of the income...

An axiomatic approach is used to propose a measure of extreme poverty which is not only multidimensional in nature, but also recognizes the fact that there are interaction effects between different deprivations, and that the length of time during which deprivations are felt may also have a...

We propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty-reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs. The methods are based on Program Dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps. These curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting...

A new tool is presented to test for the robustness of the impact on poverty of marginal tax reforms for pairs of commodities. Consumption Dominance Curves exist for every order of stochastic dominance while the more standard concentration curves are only linked to the second order of dominance....