This research study examined the effect of foreign remittances and economic growth on poverty in Pakistan. Annual time series data was analyzed for the time period 1978 to 2010. Augmented Dickey-Fuller and Philips-Perron confirmed the problem of non-stationarity at level. This problem was eliminated by taking first difference of all variables. Johansen-juselius co-integration test was applied f...

Back to the Future: Decomposition Analysis of Distributive Policies Using Behavioural Simulations For policy makers and analysts, it is important to isolate the redistributive impact of taxbenefit policy changes from changes in the environment in which policies operate. When actual reforms are motivated by work incentives, it is also crucial to evaluate behavioural responses and the distributio...

While a stated goal of minimum wage increases is to benefit low-income workers, some employers are not obligated to provide at least minimum wages to all employees. U.S. farm employers comprise one of these groups. Employees of large farms and H2-A workers (temporary nonimmigrant workers lawfully admitted to perform temporary or seasonal agricultural services) are protected by minimum wage legi...

In this paper we compute nutrient-expenditure elasticities for two macro nutrients (calories and protein) and five micro nutrients (calcium, thiamine, riboflavin, calcium and iron) using an all India sample of rural households for 1994. We show that in each case the respective elasticities are positive and significant. This lends support to our hypothesis that an increase in income would increa...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods on the long-run economic outcomes of children. My empirical strategy is based on public housing demolitions in Chicago which forced households to relocate to private market housing using vouchers. Specifically, I compare adult outcomes of children displaced by demolition to their peers who lived in near...

The paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents’ escape from poverty traps. We model and simulate endogenous network formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over time in the absence of financial markets and faced with multiple production technologies f...

Fertility Decline and the Heights of Children in Britain, 1886-1938 In this paper we argue that the fertility decline that began around 1880 had substantial positive effects on the health of children, as the quality-quantity trade-off would suggest. We use microdata from a unique survey from 1930s Britain to analyze the relationship between the standardized heights of children and the number of...

This study uses Indian unit record data from expenditure and employment surveys, in conjunction with State level indicators, to (a) investigate whether the backward classes and female headed households face higher poverty rates than others, and (b) examine the impact of poverty, along with a host of individual, family, socio economic and State characteristics, on child labour and child schoolin...

This paper explores one of the key issues in current research on gender and development: the links between poverty and young women’s employment. Specifically, the following questions were addressed, in the context of Kerala: Which young women work for pay and why? To what extent is a woman’s household economic status -especially poverty status -an important determinant of employment, and to wha...

Caste, Ethnicity and Poverty in Rural India This paper analyzes the determinants of rural poverty in India, contrasting the situation of the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Schedule Tribe (ST) households with the non-scheduled population. The incidence of poverty among SC and ST households is significantly higher than non-scheduled households. Using a probit decomposition analysis, we decompose the di...