Since the early 2000s, after a long period of wide and persistent gaps, Latin America has experienced a steady decline in income inequality. This paper presents evidence of a trend reversal in labor income inequality, which is considered the main factor behind such a decline in income inequality...

Conditional cash transfer programs, whereby transfers to households are conditional on school attendance or health checkups, have become a widespread policy tool. They are viewed as a means of immediate poverty alleviation through the cash payments, and as a foundation of long-term poverty...

This paper contributes to the limited literature on the welfare impacts of market concentration by developing a simple model that shows how exogenous variations in market power affect poverty. Increased market power leads to economy-wide welfare losses, because it raises the prices of goods and...

Developing countries are implementing policies expanding the adoption and productive use of digital technologies to advance economic development and inclusion. Yet, systematic analyses of the welfare and distributional effects of digital technologies on households and individuals-especially...

Mobile broadband internet is the main technology through which individuals access the internet in developing countries. Understanding the barriers to broadband adoption is thus a priority in designing policies aiming to expand access and close the digital divide across socioeconomic groups and...

This paper presents a novel method for estimating the likely welfare effects of competition reforms for both current and new consumers. Using household budget survey data from 2015/16 for Ethiopia and assuming a reform scenario that dilutes the market share of the telecommunications state-owned...

Understanding the selection of workers into informality is a policy priority to design programs to increase formalization across Sub-Saharan Africa, where nine out of ten workers are informal. This paper estimates a model of self-selection with entry barriers into the formal sector to identify...

Using a novel dataset with transactions level exports data from four African countries (Malawi, Mali, Senegal and Tanzania), this paper uncovers evidence of a high degree of experimentation at the extensive margin associated with low survival rates, consistent with high and middle income country...