
Professor Tarp has four decades of experience in academic and applied development economics research and teaching. His field experience covers more than two decades of in-country work in 35 countries across Africa and the developing world more...
This project investigates issues concerning poverty and vulnerability in developing countries building on behavioural economics. The project seeks to derive poverty measures that are based on prospect theory, an alternative model to expected utility theory for decision-making under uncertainty. The new measure takes into account the reference point individuals use when evaluating their wellbeing and the possibility for loss aversion, which highlights the importance of downside risks. These measures are then implemented using panel and cross-section data from developing countries.
Successful development programs rely on people to behave and choose in certain ways, and behavioral economics helps us understand why people behave and choose as they do. Approaching problems in development using behavioral economics thus leads to...
23 April 2014 Jukka Pirttilä In conventional economic theory, agents are assumed to be able to make rational choices, unaffected by emotions and not...
The poor can and do save, but often use formal or informal instruments that have high risk, high cost, and limited functionality. This could lead to undersaving compared to a world without market or behavioural frictions. Undersaving can have...
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
This Special Issue brings together papers from UNU-WIDER Conference on Poverty and Behavioural Economics that were accepted after the peer review process of the journal. The eight papers in this Special Issue all share the objective of exploring the...
21 February 2014 Tony Addison Development researchers live in a world where research on development, not just in economics but also political science...
In this paper we argue that the recent evidence on individuals’ decision making is of high relevance for the measurement of poverty when switching from a static and certain to a dynamic and uncertain framework. The numerous proposed measures of multi...
An experimental design using treatments of a voluntary contribution mechanism is used to test household efficiency. Efficiency is decisively rejected in all treatments contrary to the assumption of most household models. Information on initial...
We provide an axiomatic treatment of the measurement of economic insecurity, assuming that individual insecurity depends on the current wealth level and its variations experienced in the past. The first component plays the role of a buffer stock to...
I present a model of intra-household allocation to show that when income is not perfectly observed by both spouses, hiding of income can occur even when revelation increases bargaining power. I draw data from Ghana and exploit the variation in the...
We analyse rural household livelihood and children’s school enrollment decisions in a post-conflict setting in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region of Bangladesh. The innovation of the paper lies in the fact that we employ information about current...
This paper examines the measurement of social welfare, poverty and inequality taking into account features that have been found to be important welfare determinants in behavioural economics. Most notably, we incorporate reference-dependence, loss...
Presenting gifts at funerals, weddings, and other ceremonies held by fellow villagers have been regarded as social norms in Chinese villages for thousands of years. However, it is more burdensome for the poor to take part in these social occasions...
Behavioural economics highlights the role of social preferences in economic decisions. Further, populations are heterogeneous; suggesting that group composition may impact the ability to sustain voluntary public goods contributions. This parallels...
In the presence of inequality a status-driven utility function reconciles the conflict between income-based and nutrition-based measures of poverty. Moreover, it can explain why the poor tend to save less, an established empirical fact in the...
India addressed the requirement for pro-poor service delivery in rural regions by introducing decentralization and affirmative action policies. In order to measure the social preferences of local decision makers, we conducted field experiments which...
A number of studies document an in-group bias in social dilemma situations. While group structure and dynamics are important in shaping in-group favouritism, less attention has been paid to individual characteristics affecting favouritism. Using data...
Based on the standard axiom of individual utility maximization, rational choice has postulated that higher income inequality translates into greater redistribution by shaping the median voter’s preferences. While numerous papers have tested this...
Information failures are a major barrier to formal financial saving in low income countries. Households in rural communities often lack the information necessary to set up formal deposit accounts or are uncertain about the returns to saving formally...
The aim of this paper is to expand our knowledge on risk aversion among the poor by conducting experiments that do not only test risk aversion in small and large stakes but also in risky gains and risky losses. To our knowledge, this is the first...
Theme: Past, 2010-11