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Publications (11)
Working Paper
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– The Director's Cut
Traditional poverty measures neglect several important dimensions of household welfare. In this paper we construct a measure of ‘vulnerability’ which allows us to quantify the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as the loss associated with any of a variety of different sources of...
Working Paper
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Many argue that poverty is intimately linked with ‘vulnerability’. Still, there is no consensus about how to define and measure ‘vulnerability’. We review theory and describe strengths and limits of recently proposed measures. We then propose a definition of vulnerability and develop a general...
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– Learning from Visa®?
We examine a simple extension to existing credit contacts for the poor (‘microfinance contracts’), that would allow financial institutions to provide repayment insurance to their clients. The proposed contract uses the repeated nature of loans to build credit records that borrowers in good standing...
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– Testing Theories of Risk-Sharing in the ICRISAT Study Region of South India
Panel data from villages in rural south India have been used for leading econometric studies on risk-sharing in village economies. The work has influenced debate on safety net design world-wide and has driven scholarly agendas on household economics. This paper critically surveys work to date and...
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Food-for-work (FFW) programmes have been widely heralded as a means of providing self-targeting transfers coupled with investment in public goods. This paper reviews the changing context that has sparked such interest in FFW, the simple theory that makes it so conceptually appealing, and conceptual...
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High income risk is part of life in developing countries. Climatic risks, economic fluctuations, but also a large number of individual-specific shocks make these households vulnerable to serious hardship. For example, details are given on the various shocks and events causing serious hardship to...
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It is well known in theory that certain forms of non-linear dynamics in household incomes can yield poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth. The potential implications for policy are dramatic: effective social protection from transient poverty will be an investment with lasting benefits, and...
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The standard method of testing for efficient risk-sharing in village economies does not allow one to identify vulnerable households, only to make statements about the average risk in the village, or of sub-groups identifiable on the basis of observables. Here, by working directly with inter...
Working Paper
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In poor societies, asset accumulation serves as insurance. It also opens the door to wider inequality. Many societies prohibit certain types of accumulation, such as land sales or indenture contracts. This paper investigates the theoretical relationship between risk sharing, asset accumulation, and...
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– Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Mexico
The paper will use the data from the PROGRESA evaluation to show the extent to which such a programme crowds out private transfers. An interesting aspect of the paper is the fact that it can use the randomization (one-third of the villages in the sample were randomized in the programme for...
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The paper examines the evidence for various explanations usually offered for the differences in fertility behaviour across regions and over time in India. Female education has been found in other research to be the single most important factor driving the fall in fertility, but there are wide...
Displaying 11 of 11 results