Using changes in the possession of household assets over the past 20 years, several recent papers have argued that economic performance in Arica was substantially better than suggested by national income data and income poverty statistics, who suffer from well-known weaknesses. We scrutinize...

We investigate to what extent convergence in production levels per worker has been achieved in Germany since unification. To this end, we model the distribution of GDP per employee across German districts using two-component normal mixtures. While in the first year after unification, the two...

Zusammenfassung Die drei Essays dieser Dissertation leisten einen Beitrag zum Verständnis der politischen Ökonomie Indonesiens in Zeiten der Dezentralisierung. Vor dem Hintergrund des "Urban Poverty Project 2" (UPP2), einem kommunalen Entwicklungsprojekt in Indonesien, untersucht der erste...

Die Dissertation mit dem Titel “Battle and Beating, Water and Waste: Micro-Level Impact Evaluation in Developing and Emerging Economies” beinhaltet die Ergebnisse ökonometrischer Wirkungsevaluierungen, die innerhalb zwei verschiedener Themengebieten des täglichen Lebens in Entwicklungs-...

The purpose of this dissertation is to address policy makers to change the way they think about increasing obesity rates. So far the discussion revolves around increasing incomes and imposing taxes on high fat food, despite their disputed effectiveness. Most of these studies seem to neglect the...

Diese Dissertation basiert auf einer auf den Menschen bezogenen, multidimensionalen Betrachtung von Entwicklung. Sie soll empirisch Übereinstimmungen und Determinanten der Gesundheit von Kindern in Ländern mit niedrigem und mittlerem Einkommen analysieren. Der erste Essay – mit verfasst von...

The fact that Stephan Klasen can always give a precise answer to very complicated or even complex questions inspired the idea for this book. We asked 50 development economists (and friends of Stephan) around the world to answer 50 (serious and not-so serious) questions about development research...

Almost nine million children under five years of age die every year. Diarrhea is considered to be the second leading cause of under-five mortality in developing countries. About one out of five deaths is caused by diarrhea. In this paper, we use the newly available data set DLHS-3 to quantify...

For more than a hundred years, advances in development were associated with decreasing fertility rates. This led to total fertility rates far below replacement level in most developed countries. However, during the last decade fertility rates started to increase again in various developed...

In this paper, we compare Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) methods to generate weights for composite indices. In this context we also consider various treatments of non-metric variables when constructing such composite indices. Using simulation studies we find...