A "poverty trap" can be understood as a set of self-reinforcing mechanisms whereby countries start poor and remain poor: poverty begets poverty, so that current poverty is itself a direct cause of poverty in the future. The idea of a poverty trap has this striking implication for policy: much...

The global expansion of urban slums poses questions for economic research as well as problems for policymakers. We provide evidence that the type of poverty observed in contemporary slums of the developing world is characteristic of that described in the literature on poverty traps. We document...

We study the local effects of a federal program that helped cities clear areas for redevelopment, rehabilitate structures, complete city plans, and enforce building codes. We use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the program's effects on city-level measures of income, property...

This paper uses a new indicator to track poverty from 2001 to 2006 in small areas in Great Britain. The indicator, called Unadjusted Means-tested Benefits Rate (UMBR), was devised by Fenton (2013) and is the ratio of claimants of means tested benefits to the number of households in a small area....

The objective of this paper is to provide some empirical evidence of relevant risk factors and causal mechanisms to understand criminal behavior in Romania. In order to achieve this goal, some socio-economic variables are considered: long-term unemployment rate and people at risk of poverty or...

Neighborhood decline is a complex and multidimensional process. National and regional variation in economic and political structures (including variety in national welfare state arrangements), combined with differences in neighborhood history, development and population composition, makes it...

We propose the use of Google online search data for nowcasting and forecasting the number of food stamps recipients. We perform a large out-of-sample forecasting exercise with almost 3000 competing models with forecast horizons up to 2 years ahead, and we show that models including Google search...

BASED ON A SERIES OF SURVEYS ON THE LIVING AND MIGRATION CONDITIONS OF CHILDREN, THIS STUDY HIGHLIGHTS THE MAGNITUDE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF CHILD LABOUR IN BURKINA FASO, CÔTE D'IVOIRE AND MALI. FOUR (04) MAJOR LESSONS WERE LEARNT : (I) THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF CHILDREN WORKING IN VIOLATION...