The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted survey and data systems globally and especially in low- and middle-income countries. Lockdowns necessitated remote data collection as demand for data on the impacts of the pandemic surged. Phone surveys started being implemented at a national scale in many...

Several developing countries are currently implementing phone surveys in response to immediate data needs to monitor the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19. However, phone surveys are often subject to coverage and non-response bias that can compromise the representativeness of the sample and the...

By most accounts, rural Malawi has lacked dynamism in the past decade. Growth has been mostly volatile, in large part due to unstable macroeconomic fundamentals evidenced by high inflation, fiscal deficits, and interest rates. When rapid economic growth has materialized, the gains have not...

This paper examines the effect of the intensity, timing, and persistence of personal history of mobility on individual support for redistribution. Using both rounds of Life in Transition Survey, we build measures of downward mobility for about 57 thousand individuals from 27 countries in Eastern...

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Bank's twin...

This study estimates marginal increase in malnutrition for children ages 1-3 years from exposure to an extreme shock in the West African Sahel. The study uses knowledge of a child's birth and high resolution spatial and temporal distribution of shocks, calculated from the Normalized Difference...

Although resilience has become a popular concept in studies of poverty and vulnerability, it has been difficult to obtain a credible measure of resilience. This difficulty is because the data required to measure resilience, which involves observing household outcomes over time after every...

This study examines the significance of food crop diversification as a household risk mitigating strategy to achieve "self-sufficiency" to ensure food security during the civil conflict in Cote d’Ivoire. The main motivation for seeking self-sufficiency stems from the fact that during the...