Research papers:
Fairness and inequality tolerance: evidence from the Life in Transition Survey (Journal of Comparative Economics, 2014).
Abstract: This paper examines the link between inequality and individual well-being using household survey data from 27 Transition Economies, where income inequality increased considerably since 1989. A test of inequality aversion in individual preferences that draws on the Fehr and Schmidt (QJE, 1999) specification of inequality aversion is proposed, and the difficulties of implementing it in a non-experimental setting are discussed. Estimates based on this model confirm aversion to inequality both in the overall sample and in the regional sub-samples. The Gini index, on the other hand, is unable to capture this negative effect of inequality on well-being. Notably, inequality aversion is not intrinsic. Rather, it appears to be tied to a concern with the fairness of the institutions underlying the distribution of fortunes in society. The evidence is suggestive of inequality of opportunity driving attitudes toward overall inequality.
Prospects of upward mobility and preferences for redistribution: Evidence from the Life in Transition Survey (European Journal of Political Economy, 2014).
Abstract: This paper investigates empirically the link between the prospects of upward mobility and preferences for redistribution using data for a large number of countries from the Life in Transition Survey. The survey is unique in that it provides a detailed account of expected future mobility, and makes it possible to differentiate respondents by their degree of risk aversion – both key pillars of the POUM model. The results from the pooled sample, and those for the EU Member States confirm the theoretical predictions of Benabou and Ok (2001) - individuals’ expectations of upward mobility reduce their preference for redistribution, but only when the degree of risk aversion is low. The POUM hypothesis is not borne out by the data in the non-EU countries.
How reliable and consistent are subjective measures of welfare in Europe and Central Asia? (Economics of Transition, 2015; with Mame Fatou Diagne).
Abstract: This paper analyses the reliability and consistency of subjective well-being measures, using the Life in Transition Survey. Drawing on two life satisfaction questions with alternative scales, our results do not reveal substantial biases in accounts of life satisfaction due to framing. Subjective individual assessments of household relative income position, on the other hand, do not appear to be reliable predictors of objective poverty or wealth. We find that subjective relative income position is only weakly correlated with objective welfare measures. There are differences in evaluations of the household's relative standing across different household members, and these differences are correlated with respondent characteristics.
Does relative deprivation matter in developing countries: evidence from six Transition Economies (Social Indicators Research, 2016)
Abstract: Existing evidence on whether relative status is an important determinant of well-being has two key features: it is mainly derived from high income countries, and it relies on relative deprivation measures constructed by the researchers, rather than being reported by the respondents. The need to construct relative deprivation measures imposes strong assumptions with respect to observability of relative deprivation. This paper adds evidence on the importance of social comparisons based on self-reported relative status assessments, which obviates the need to impose observability assumptions. The underlying survey data has the added benefit of coming from six transition economies at different levels of economic development, making it possible to explore the role of social comparisons at low income levels. Interviewer's observations of the household's relative deprivation are also employed to address the endogeneity concerns associated with using self-reported relative status measures. The results suggest that relative deprivation is indeed a welfare-relevant concern, even in the poorest countries in Eastern Europe. Among multiple reference groups available in the data, local social comparisons appear to be most salient.
Flaunt them If you’ve Got them? Informal Connections and Beliefs About Prospects of Upward Mobility in Transition Economies (Comparative Economic Studies, 2023)
Abstract: Expectations of future upward mobility have been shown to determine current preferences for redistribution, but how are these expectations formed? This study presents evidence that expectations of future mobility may be constrained by beliefs about how fair is access to key opportunities in life, like a good government or private sector job, or university education. Data from the Life in Transition survey show that those who believe informal connections to be vital to access these key opportunities—a widespread belief in the region—have lower expectations of future upward mobility, while access to informal connections is associated with a 40% higher expected future mobility. Finally, those who perceive access to opportunities to be unfair and mediated by informal connections also demand more redistribution, unless such connections are available to secure access to opportunities.
Redistributive preferences in Europe and Central Asia 2006-2016 (Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, 2021; with Mame Fatou Diagne)
Abstract: This paper analyses support for reducing inequality and for redistribution to specific groups in Europe and Central Asia. Using the Life in Transition Surveys, it examines differences in redistributive preferences across countries and time, as well as determinants of individual preferences, testing for motivations such as self-interest, past and expected future social mobility, and beliefs about fairness. In transition countries, fewer people wanted to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor in 2010 than in 2006. The most favored groups for assistance are the disabled and the elderly. The motives for redistribution toward different groups are not uniform -- self-interest appears to be a basis for assistance to the elderly and families with children, whereas values and beliefs are associated with support for the working poor and the unemployed.
Inequality and Well-Being in Transition: Linking Experience and Perception to Policy Preferences. In Douarin, E., and Havrylyshyn, O., Eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative Economics. 2021. Palgrave Macmillan.
Abstract: This chapter reviews the dynamics of economic inequality in the region from the early 1990s until today, distinguishing between actual and perceived inequality dynamics. It then looks at whether inequality matters for the well-being of people, and for their policy preferences. The evidence reviewed shows that the early 1990s saw a sharp increase in inequality, although reliable data from that period is patchy. Over the past 2 decades, on the other hand, income inequality has been declining in the majority of transition economies. These dynamics in observed inequality are somewhat at odds with perceptions of inequality being relatively high, and the chapter reviews some of the possible drivers of the discrepancy, with a focus on inequality of opportunity and considerations of fairness.
Global evidence on the economic effects of disease suppression during COVID-19, (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(78) 2024; with Jonathan Rothwell, Yeon Soo Kim and Rajesh Srinivasan)
Abstract: Governments around the world attempted to suppress the spread of COVID-19 using restrictions on social and economic activity. This study presents the first global analysis of job and income losses associated with those restrictions, using Gallup World Poll data from 321,000 randomly selected adults in 117 countries from July 2020 to March 2021. Nearly half of the world’s adult population lost income because of COVID-19, according to our estimates, and this outcome and related measures of economic harm—such as income loss—are strongly associated with lower subjective well-being, financial hardship, and self-reported loss of subjective well-being. Our primary analysis uses a multilevel model with country and month-year levels, so we can simultaneously test for significant associations between both individual demographic predictors of harm and time-varying country-level predictors. We find that an increase of one-standard deviation in policy stringency, averaged up to the time of the survey date, predicts a 0.37 std increase in an index of economic harm (95% CI 0.24–0.51) and a 14.2 percentage point (95% CI 8.3–20.1 ppt) increase in the share of workers experiencing job loss. Similar effect sizes are found comparing stringency levels between top and bottom-quintile countries. Workers with lower-socioeconomic status—measured by within-country income rank or education—were much more likely to report harm linked to the pandemic than those with tertiary education or relatively high incomes. The gradient between harm and stringency is much steeper for workers at the bottom quintiles of the household income distribution than it is for those at the top, which we show with interaction models. Socioeconomic status is unrelated to harm where stringency is low, but highly and negatively associated with harm where it is high. Our detailed policy analysis reveals that school closings, stay-at-home orders, and other economic restrictions were strongly associated with economic harm, but other non-pharmaceutical interventions—such as contact tracing, mass testing, and protections for the elderly were not.
COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in 53 developing countries: Levels, trends and reasons for hesitancy, (British Medical Journal Open, November 2023; with Julia Dayton, Ifeanyi Edochie, David Newhouse, Gildas Deudibe, Jakub Kakietek, Yeon Soo Kim and Jose Montes)
Abstract: This paper presents new evidence on the levels and trends of vaccine hesitancy in developing countries based on harmonized high-frequency phone surveys from more than 120,000 respondents in 53 low- and middle-income countries. These countries represent a combined 30 percent of the population of low- and middle-income countries. On average across countries, one in five adults is hesitant about the COVID-19 vaccine, with the most cited reasons for hesitancy being concerns about the safety of the vaccine, followed by concerns about its efficacy. Between late 2020 and the first half of 2021, there tended to be little change in levels of hesitancy except in Iraq, Malawi, and Uzbekistan, where hesitancy increased. COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is higher among female, young, less educated, and rural respondents, after controlling for selected observable characteristics. Country estimates of vaccine hesitancy from the high-frequency phone surveys are correlated with but lower than those from earlier studies, which often relied on less representative survey samples. The results suggest that vaccine hesitancy in developing countries, while less prevalent than previously thought, will be an important and enduring obstacle to recovery from the pandemic.
Long-COVID: The unrecovered losses of the pandemic employment crisis in developing countries, (World Development, 175 (2024) 106485; with Maurice Kugler, Ben Brunckhorst, Ruth Hill and Yeon Soo Kim)
Abstract: This study examines household welfare dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic, using harmonized data from over 300 phone surveys in 80 countries during 2020 and 2021, representing more than 2.5 billion people. The analysis traces out the evolution of employment and income across and within countries as restrictions on economic activity were relaxed. We show some groups initially experiencing higher rates of employment loss – including women, informal workers, and those with less education – also recovered jobs at a slower pace. Based on panel regressions, changes in policy stringency were associated with unequal employment outcomes. Labor market transitions were toward jobs of inferior quality on average, especially for workers with less education. Household income dynamics suggest uneven impacts in the intensive margin of employment consistent with these transitions. Lower wages were not offset by additional social assistance. Taken together, these dynamics may amplify the inequality impacts of the pandemic over the medium to long term.
World Bank reports and other publications:
Guidelines to small area estimation for poverty mapping, Washington, DC: World Bank (with Paul Corral, Isabel Molina and Sandra Segovia)
World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery, Washington, DC: World Bank. (core team member)
"Impact of COVID-19 on global income inequality", in World Bank, 2022, Global Economic Prospects, January 2022, Washington, DC: World Bank. (with Amat Adarov, Ambar Narayan and Sinem Kilic Celik)
Reversals of Fortune: Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2020. (with Samuel Freije-Rodriguez, Michael Woolcock, R. Andres Castaneda, Elizabeth Howton, Christoph Lakner, Minh Cong Nguyen, Marta Schoch, Judy Yang, and Nishant Yonzan)
Enhancing Access to Opportunities. IMF and the World Bank Group (Group of Twenty) (with Lone Christiansen, Ambar Narayan and Adil Mohommad)
Fair Progress? Economic Mobility Across Generations Around the World. Equity and Development. Washington, DC: The World Bank. (with Ambar Narayan, Roy Van der Weide, Christoph Lakner, Silvia Redaelli, Daniel Gerszon Mahler, Rakesh Gupta Ramasubbaiah, and Stefan Thewissen).
Poverty, vulnerability and household coping strategies during the 2015-16 recession in Belarus. Policy Research Working Paper No. 9003. The World Bank Group (with Kateryna Bornukova, Mikhail Matytsin and Gleb Shymanovich)
Fiscal incidence in Moldova: A Commitment to Equity analysis. Policy Research Working Paper No. 9010. The World Bank Group (with Mikhail Matytsin and Valeriu Prohnitchi)
Kosovo Jobs Diagnostic. Jobs Series No. 5. World Bank, Washington, DC.
Poverty and shared prosperity in Belarus over the past decade: trends, drivers and challenges (with Mikhail Matytsin)
Poverty and inequality in Bosnia and Herzegovina 2007-2011. World Bank report No. 97643 (in collaboration with BHAS, FBO and RSIS)
Updating the poverty estimates in Serbia in the absence of micro data: a microsimulation approach. Policy Research Working Paper No. 6889, The World Bank Group. (with Sergio Olivieri)
Skills development in the informal sector: Tanzania. in Adams, Avril, Sara Johansson de Silva, and Setareh Ramzah, Eds., Improving Skills Development in the Informal Sector: Strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa, Directions in Development, Washington, DC: The World Bank Group. (with Richard Johanson and Goodwill Wanga)
Insights from material deprivation indicators in Bosnia Herzegovina. In Ruggeri Laderchi, Caterina and Sara Savastano, Eds., Poverty and Exclusion in the Western Balkans: New Directions in Measurement and Policy, Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion and Well-Being, Vol. 8, Springer. (with Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi)
Improving the Targeting of Social Assistance in Albania: evidence from micro-simulations. In Ruggeri Laderchi, Caterina and Sara Savastano, Eds., Poverty and Exclusion in the Western Balkans: New Directions in Measurement and Policy, Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion and Well-Being, Vol. 8, Springer. (with Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi, Ramya Sundaram and Natsuko Kiso)
Social exclusion in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the global crisis. (with Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi)
Poverty Update for the Republic of Serbia: 2007-2009. (with Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi)