scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Author

Deon Filmer

Bio: Deon Filmer is an academic researcher from World Bank. The author has contributed to research in topics: Poverty & Population. The author has an hindex of 43, co-authored 148 publications receiving 18682 citations. Previous affiliations of Deon Filmer include World Bank Group & International Monetary Fund.


Papers
More filters
Posted Content
Deon Filmer1
TL;DR: This article found that adults with disabilities typically live in poorer than average households: disability is associated with about a 10 percentage point increase in the probability of falling in the two poorest quintiles.
Abstract: Analysis of 14 household surveys from 13 developing countries suggests that 1-2 percent of the population have disabilities. Adults with disabilities typically live in poorer than average households: disability is associated with about a 10 percentage point increase in the probability of falling in the two poorest quintiles. Much of the association appears to reflect lower educational attainment among adults with disabilities. People of ages 6-17 with disabilities do not live in systematically wealthier or poorer households than other people of their age, although in all countries studied they are significantly less likely to start school or to be enrolled at the time of the survey. The order of magnitude of the school participation deficit associated with disability-which is as high as 50 percentage points in 3 of the 13 countries-is often larger than deficits related to other characteristics, such as gender, rural residence, or economic status differentials. The results suggest a worrisome vicious cycle of low schooling attainment and subsequent poverty among people with disabilities in developing countries.

1 citations

01 Nov 2013
TL;DR: A World Bank supported study in Cambodia, where researchers set out to study the effects of scholarships on encouraging primary school students to continue their studies in lower secondary school, and whether bigger grants worked better than smaller ones as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: This bulletin showcases a World Bank supported study in Cambodia, where researchers set out to study the effects of scholarships on encouraging primary school students to continue their studies in lower secondary school, and whether bigger grants worked better than smaller ones. The results of the study underscore the importance impact evaluation can have for policymakers, even as researchers plan a second round of data collection to answer some important questions raised by the results. Building on the lessons learned from this evaluation, the government of Cambodia is planning a revised approach in its 2014-2018 strategic education plan to strengthen the quality of preschools and ensure demand for these services. This Evidence to Policy note was jointly produced by the World Bank Group, the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF), and the British government's Department for International Development.

1 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: The impact of financial crises on labor markets, household incomes, and poverty in developing countries is discussed in this article. But the authors do not consider the impact of the East Asian crisis on farm households in Indonesia and Thailand.
Abstract: Weathering the storm : the impact of the East Asian crisis on farm households in Indonesia and Thailand; by Fabrizio Bresciani, Gershon Feder, Daniel O. Gilligan, Hanan G. Jacoby, Tongroj Onchan, and Jaime Quizon. The impact of financial crises on labor markets, household incomes, and poverty : a review of evidence; by Peter R. Fallon and Robert E.B. Lucas. Weak links in the chain II : a prescription for health policy in poor countries; by Deon Filmer, Jeffrey S. Hammer, and Lant H. Pritchett. Public intervention in health insurance markets : theory and four examples from Latin America; by William Jack. Urbanization in developing countries; by Vernon Henderson. Developing countries and a new round of WTO negotiations; by Thomas W. Hertel, Bernard M. Hoekman, and Will Martin.

1 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that a household-targeted Philippine cash transfer program significantly raised the local price of key foods relevant for child nutritional status, which increased stunting among young non-beneficiary children by 34 percent (11 percentage points).
Abstract: Based on a randomized evaluation, the paper shows that a household-targeted Philippine cash transfer program significantly raised the local price of key foods relevant for child nutritional status. This shift in prices increased stunting among young nonbeneficiary children by 34 percent (11 percentage points). Price and stunting effects increase in program saturation; at median saturation, the village income shock is 15 percent. These effects persist 2.5 years after program introduction. The authors confirm the price patterns in their experimental sample against price information from nationally-representative household expenditure surveys across the 6-year rollout of the program. Failing to consider such general equilibrium effects may overstate the net benefits of targeted cash transfers. In areas where targeting of social programs covers a large proportion of the population, offering the program on a universal basis may avoid such long-lasting negative impacts at moderate additional cost.

1 citations

ReportDOI
24 Feb 2022
TL;DR: Araujo et al. as discussed by the authors found that teachers explain a significant share of variation across students' achievement, but these achievements are poorly correlated with teachers' observable characteristics including age, gender, education, experience, and hours in the school.
Abstract: Teachers explain a significant share of variation across students’ achievement (Araujo et al., 2016; Bold et al., 2019; Dobbie and Fryer, 2013). But these achievements are poorly correlated with teachers’ observable characteristics including age, gender, education, experience, and hours in the school (Aaronson et al., 2007; Kane and Staiger, 2008; Rockoff et al., 2008). This suggests there could be other factors such as teachers’ content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, classroom behaviour, and other practices that are potentially important determinants of students’ academic performance. There is growing interest in understanding these factors and exploring how they impact student learning. This has led to an increase in the development and use of structured classroom observation tools to observe, analyse, and measure teaching and learning practices within classrooms. These tools have provided information on current teaching practices and improvements over time.

1 citations


Cited by
More filters
Posted Content
TL;DR: This work estimates the relationship between household wealth and children’s school enrollment in India by constructing a linear index from asset ownership indicators, using principal-components analysis to derive weights, and shows that this index is robust to the assets included, and produces internally coherent results.
Abstract: The relationship between household wealth and educational enrollment of children can be estimated without expenditure data. A method for doing so - which uses an index based on household asset ownership indicators - is proposed and defended in this paper. In India, children from the wealthiest households are over 30 percentage points more likely to be in school than those from the poorest households, although this gap varies considerably across states. To estimate the relationship between household wealth and the probability that a child (aged 6 to 14) is enrolled in school, Filmer and Pritchett use National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data collected in Indian states in 1992 and 1993. In developing their estimate Filmer and Pritchett had to overcome a methodological difficulty: The NFHS, modeled closely on the Demographic and Health Surveys, measures neither household income nor consumption expenditures. As a proxy for long-run household wealth, they constructed a linear asset index from a set of asset indicators, using principal components analysis to derive the weights. This asset index is robust, produces internally coherent results, and provides a close correspondence with data on state domestic product and on state level poverty rates. They validate the asset index using data on consumption spending and asset ownership from Indonesia, Nepal, and Pakistan. The asset index has reasonable coherence with current consumption expenditures and, more importantly, works as well as - or better than - traditional expenditure-based measures in predicting enrollment status. The authors find that on average a child from a wealthy household (in the top 20 percent on the asset index developed for this analysis) is 31 percent more likely to be enrolled in school than a child from a poor household (in the bottom 40 percent). This paper - a product of Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to inform educational policy. The study was funded by the Bank`s Research Support Budget under the research project Educational Enrollment and Dropout (RPO 682-11).

4,966 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: A Treatise on the Family by G. S. Becker as discussed by the authors is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics.
Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

4,817 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a method for estimating the effect of household economic status on educational outcomes without direct survey information on income or expenditures is proposed and defended, which uses an index based on household asset ownership indicators.
Abstract: This paper has an empirical and overtly methodological goal. The authors propose and defend a method for estimating the effect of household economic status on educational outcomes without direct survey information on income or expenditures. They construct an index based on indicators of household assets, solving the vexing problem of choosing the appropriate weights by allowing them to be determined by the statistical procedure of principal components. While the data for India cannot be used to compare alternative approaches they use data from Indonesia, Nepal, and Pakistan which have both expenditures and asset variables for the same households. With these data the authors show that not only is there a correspondence between a classification of households based on the asset index and consumption expenditures but also that the evidence is consistent with the asset index being a better proxy for predicting enrollments--apparently less subject to measurement error for this purpose--than consumption expenditures. The relationship between household wealth and educational enrollment of children can be estimated without expenditure data. A method for doing so - which uses an index based on household asset ownership indicators- is proposed and defended in this paper. In India, children from the wealthiest households are over 30 percentage points more likely to be in school than those from the poorest households.

4,661 citations

Posted Content
David Dollar1, Aart Kraay1
TL;DR: Dollar and Kraay as mentioned in this paper found that the share of income accruing to the bottom quintile does not vary systematically with the average income, and that when average incomes rise, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately.
Abstract: When average incomes rise, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately. This holds across regions, periods, income levels, and growth rates. But relatively little is known about the broad forces that account for the variations across countries and across time in the share of income accruing to the poorest fifth. When average incomes rise, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately. This is a consequence of the strong empirical regularity that the share of income accruing to the bottom quintile does not vary systematically with average income. Dollar and Kraay document this empirical regularity in a sample of 92 countries spanning the past four decades and show that it holds across regions, periods, income levels, and growth rates. Dollar and Kraay next ask whether the factors that explain cross-country differences in the growth rates of average incomes have differential effects on the poorest fifth of society. They find that several determinants of growth - such as good rule of law, openness to international trade, and developed financial markets - have little systematic effect on the share of income that accrues to the bottom quintile. Consequently, these factors benefit the poorest fifth of society as much as everyone else. There is some weak evidence that stabilization from high inflation and reductions in the overall size of government not only increase growth but also increase the income share of the poorest fifth in society. Finally, Dollar and Kraay examine several factors commonly thought to disproportionately benefit the poorest in society, but find little evidence of their effects. The absence of robust findings emphasizes that relatively little is known about the broad forces that account for the cross-country and intertemporal variation in the share of income accruing to the poorest fifth of society. This paper - a product of Macroeconomics and Growth, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study growth and poverty reduction. The authors may be contacted at ddollar@worldbank.org or akraay@worldbank.org.

3,407 citations