Working Paper
Marital trajectories and women’s wellbeing in Senegal
Divorce and widowhood followed by remarriage are common for women in Africa. A key question is how such discontinuous marital trajectories affect women’s wellbeing. Women’s marital trajectories in Senegal are described and correlated with measures of...
Journal Article
Food access and subjective welfare in a developing country
Understanding the relationship between food access and welfare is critical in the design of social welfare policies, but the literature on this relationship is scarce. Employing the framework by Van Praag (1968) to a household survey data on Ghana...
Working Paper
Welfare losses, preferences for redistribution, and political participation
This paper studies the effect of austerity on forms of political participation—including voting, appealing for reform, and peaceful protesting—and the role of preferences for redistribution in shaping the relationship between individual exposure to...
Journal Article
Reducing delay in payments in welfare programs
This study assesses the impact of an information dissemination intervention on the local-level implementation of the rural public works program in India. One key feature of the intervention is to provide information to workers once their wages get...
Working Paper
Rural financial intermediation and poverty reduction in Ghana
The financial sector in rural areas, where most of the poor people in sub-Saharan Africa are found, has transformed massively in recent times, notably through the increased penetration of several types of rural financial intermediaries in addition to...
Working Paper
Gender preference at birth
Investigating preference for sons is a continuing focal area of development economics and demographic research. Son preference presents a challenge in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of ‘no poverty’, ‘good health and...
Working Paper
Agricultural risks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and farm household welfare and diversification strategies in Africa
Agricultural activities in many African countries are bedevilled by a range of risk factors. Using micro-level household datasets from a range of countries in Africa, we examine the drivers of agricultural risks, while exploring the role of context...
Working Paper
Inclusion amid ethnic inequality
Policy frames in Brazil have long run up against conflicting visions and understandings about the causes and consequences of group-based inequality. This paper argues that a class-based lens has dominated the social protection framework. In recent...
Working Paper
Dynastic measures of inter-generational mobility with empirical evidence from Indonesia
We suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes (continuous outcomes such as potential earnings, or discrete ones such as education groups) and captures dynastic...
Working Paper
Clientelism, public goods provision, and governance
It is widely believed that clientelism—the giving of material goods in return for electoral support—is associated with poorer development outcomes. However, systematic cross-country evidence on the deleterious effects of clientelism on development...
Journal Article
Rural financial intermediation and poverty reduction in Ghana
The financial sector in rural areas, where most of the poor people in sub-Saharan Africa are found, has transformed massively in recent times, notably through the increased penetration of several types of rural financial intermediaries in addition to...
Report
Policy in the time of pandemic
This case study details the policy choices and decisions of the South African government to provide economic relief, through social grants, to vulnerable South Africans and those resident in South Africa to enable them to withstand the effects of the...
Journal Article
Do gender wage differences within households influence women's empowerment and welfare?
Using household data from the latest wave of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, this paper utilizes machine learning techniques – IV LASSO – that allows for the treatment of unconfoundedness in the selection of observables and unobservables to...
Working Paper
Welfare and redistributive effects of social assistance in the Global South
This paper presents an analysis of the recent evolution of social assistance in the developing world, looking at its complex typological configuration, which has interlinked with, and partly reflects the complex demographic and epidemiological...