Each year, the “Organisationsforum Wirtschaftskongress (OfW e.V.)” — a non-profit student organization — welcomes 300 professionals and 300 of the top international students to Cologne, Germany, to discuss important topics in today’s economy and society. This event is the World Business Dialogue and on March 17th and 18th, 2010, we will hold our 13th Dialogue. The convention’s goal is to improve international relations by providing a platform

COLUMBIA BUSINESS SCHOOL ANNOUNCES ADMISSION INFORMATION SESSION AND RECEPTION IN BUCHAREST HOSTED BY ASSISTANT DEAN LINDA MEEHAN New York – September 22, 2008 – Columbia Business School announces an admission information session and reception to be hosted by Assistant Dean of Admissions Mrs. Linda Meehan, scheduled to take place in Bucharest, Romania: Date & Time: Wednesday, September 24, from 18.00 to 20.00 Location: Academia de Studii Economice,

Poverty and inequality are often estimated from grouped data as complete household surveys are neither always available to researchers nor easy to analyze. In this study we assess the performance of functional forms proposed by Kakwani (1980a) and Villasenor and Arnold (1989) to estimate the Lorenz curve from grouped data. The methods are implemented using the computational tools POVCAL and SimSIP, developed and distributed by the World Bank. To

Grouped data have been widely used to analyze the global income distribution because individual records from nationally representative household surveys are often unavailable. In this paper we evaluate the performance of nonparametric density smoothing techniques, in particular kernel density estimation, in estimating poverty from grouped data. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that kernel density estimation gives rise to nontrivial biases in

We evaluate the claim that world consumption poverty has fallen since 1990 in light of alternative assumptions about the extent of initial poverty and the rate of subsequent poverty reduction in China, India, and the rest of the developing world. We use two poverty indicators: the aggregate headcount and the headcount ratio, and consider two widely-used international poverty lines ($1/day and $2/day). We conclude that, because of uncertainties in

Recent influential studies among development economists claim that aid to developing countries is not nearly as beneficial to recipient nations as had been expected. Are these statistical analyses right? One problem is that total aid, on which most studies are based, includes two distinct kinds of aid. The first is what we might call “developmental” aid, and the second, geopolitical aid. When the authors focus only on the first kind of aid, they

The primary focus of my dissertation is on the measurement of national, regional and global poverty from grouped income data (representing mean incomes for a few population quantiles) which is often available to researchers in lieu of unit data from nationally representative household surveys. The dissertation also concerns itself with the growth - effectiveness of aid, and with the recent dynamics of global poverty.

We test the hypothesis of Pareto optimal risk-sharing in a transition economy using a new dataset on a representative sample of 364 rural households from Romania. We identify income shocks as instances of adverse weather, crop and animal diseases, as well as illness and unemployment spells. Despite limited participation of Romanian rural households in formal insurance and credit markets, we fail to reject the hypothesis of full insurance of total

We analyze the growth impact of official development assistance to developing countries. Our approach is different from that of previous studies in two major ways. First, we disentangle the effects of two components of aid: a developmental, growth-enhancing component, and a geopolitical, possibly growth-depressing component. Second, our specifications allow for the effect of aid on economic growth to occur over long timelags. Our results indicate