Low and middle income countries

In this paper we look at whether conditions in early life can have persistent influence on the development of personality traits, as has been shown to be the case for health and cognitive skills. We find strong and robust evidence of persistent impacts among siblings of early life rainfall fluctuations on measures of latent personality trait, known as core self-evaluation, in adulthood.

This paper looks at corporate income taxes in developing countries from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective.

This paper reviews the literature studying econometric methods for the analysis of social networks. It begins by discussing identification of models of social effects using observational and experimental data, before outlining models of network formation. Finally, it discusses how one might collect data on networks, and the measurement error issues caused by sampling of networks, as well as measurement error more broadly.

This paper evaluates the large scale pilot of an innovative and major welfare intervention in Colombia, which combines homes visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs.

This paper considers the income generated by cow or buffalo in the district of Anantapur, India and shows how drought affects returns.

In this paper we examine the learning achievement of primary school pupils in Vietnam and explore the relationships between home-background, teacher, peer and school factors and learning progress in Grade 5, using data from Young Lives. We find that disadvantaged pupils receive relatively equitable access in relation to indicators of ‘fundamental’ school quality, a considerable policy success regarding the provision of ‘minimum standards’. However, differences by home advantage are relatively large where more sophisticated ‘opportunities to learn’ are considered, such as the number of hours of instruction received, including through ‘extra classes’, as well as access to learning resources such as computers, internet and non-text books.

We study changes in living conditions using longitudinal data covering 30 years in six villages in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, initially surveyed during 1975–1984, and resurveyed in recent years, as part of the ICRISAT Village Level Studies. Monetary welfare indicators (such as incomes, assets, consumption and poverty) and non-monetary indicators of well-being (such as basic literacy, education, health and subjective well-being) have improved considerably. Consumption growth is linked to literacy and education at baseline. Other assets, such as land, have a neglible impact, suggesting that labour and human capital have been instrumental for growth in these villages.Change involved a large increase in various off-farm activities.

We estimate marginal propensities to consume from wealth shocks for Italian households.

This paper estimates the behavioural response of consumers to price changes in the Czech Republic applying a consumer demand model of the quadratic almost ideal system (QUAIDS) form to the Czech Statistical Office data for the period from 2001 to 2011.

Drawing on the seminal Mirrlees Review, this report sets out the basic principles of good tax design and reform, with a particular focus on the implications for middle income countries such as Turkey.

This paper presents an analysis of the welfare consequences of recent increases in food prices in Mexico using micro-level data.

It is often argued that informal labour markets in developing countries are the engine of growth because their existence allows firms to operate in an environment where wage and regulatory costs are lower