Multidimensional poverty measures are increasingly used in practice even though they face strong criticism and generate longlasting debates. These contentions primarily find their origin in the divergence between standard poverty identification practices and a welfarist definition of the poor....

Absolute poverty lines aim to track a fixed poverty standard consistently. There are two main approaches for the construction of absolute poverty lines. The "welfaristic" approach tracks a fixed level of utility, and the "objective" approach tracks a fixed list of achievements. As they yield...

Many developing countries' official poverty methodologies rely on nonstandard poverty lines, which complicate poverty comparisons across space or time. The paper considers the case of the Arab Republic of Egypt, whose official poverty lines have two important nonstandard features. First, the...

Identity is an important determinant of economic behavior. A limitation of the existing literature is the focus on one identity dimension at a time. We show that the multiplicity of identity dimensions matters for economic behavior and that neglecting it may lead policy makers to overlook...

We examine how political participation and political competition are shaped by two class-based extensions of the franchise in 20th-century India. Creating a new dataset of district level political outcomes between 1921 and 1957, we find that the partial franchise extension of 1935 resulted in...

This paper investigates whether the religious identity of state legislators in India influences development outcomes, both for citizens of their religious group and for the population as a whole. To control for politician identity to be correlated with constituency level voter preferences or...