There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

I analyze the impact of food price inflation on parental decisions to send their children to school. Moreover, I use the fact that food crop farmers and cotton farmers were exposed differently to that shock to estimate the income elasticity of school enrolment. The results suggest that the...

In developing countries illness shocks can have a severe impact on household income. Few studies have so fare examined the effects of mortality. The major difference between illness and mortality shocks is that a death of a household member does not only induce direct costs such as medical and...

Whereas life expectancy continues to increase in most industrialized countries many developing and transition countries are today confronted with decreases in life expectancy. Usual measures employed to compare welfare over time and space fail to deal with such demographic change and may lead to...

We propose a new methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space that does not arbitrarily aggregate income over various years or rely on arbitrarily specified poverty lines or poverty indices. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic...

The recent focus on ‘pro-poor growth’ led also to an intense debate on how exactly to define and to measure pro-poor growth. All suggested measures have in common that they are based on the anonymity axiom. Such a perspective may provide a very incomplete picture given that the common...

Lack of knowledge about differential AIDS mortality seriously hampers the study of the economic impact of AIDS in developing countries. We derive HIV infection risk differentials by age, education, and other microeconomic characteristics using the Ivorian Demographic and Health Survey. Our model...

We build a micro-simulation model able to simulate over a 15 years' period the impact of AIDS on the distribution of income in Côte d'Ivoire. We focus on the labour supply effects of AIDS-induced mortality. We find that although the size of the economy in terms of total household income is...

In 2002 Malawi experienced a serious shortage of cereals due to adverse climatic conditions. The World Food Programme assumed that about 2.1 to 3.2 million people were threatened of starvation at that time. However, not much research has been undertaken to investigate the actual consequences of...

There is a well-known debate about the role of institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. We believe there is value-added to consider the institutions hypothesis at the micro level within a country to analyze the exact transmission channels linking endogenous...