Felix Naschold
| Degree | Ph.D. |
| Area of Interest | Economics of Development |
| Chair | Chris Barrett |
| Country of Origin | Germany |
| Email Address | fn23@cornell.edu |
| Campus Address | 214 Warren Hall |
Felix started his Ph.D. in the fall of 2002 having previously worked in the
Overseas Development Institute in London and in the Ministry of Finance in
Fiji on poverty, public policy and expenditure management issues.
Felix' research focuses on poverty dynamics - both for the challenge it poses
academically and for its immediate practical relevance to poverty reduction
policies. His dissertation research papers span the following issues:
1. Identifying Asset Poverty Thresholds. Do non-linearities
and locally increasing returns to asset holdings give rise to threshold effects
that prevent households from escaping poverty over time? The main focus here
is to adapt semiparametric statistical techniques to identify the levels of
potential poverty thresholds and to examine which combination of asset holdings
would be necessary to escape poverty. Poverty is measured by the stock-measure
assets, as these tend to reflect the underlying economic well-being of households
better than the traditional flow-based measures of consumption or income.
2. Transitory income and transitory poverty. Panel data studies
in developing countries have concluded that a very substantial percentage
of the population moves in and out of poverty over short periods of time.
This part of Felix’ research develops statistical tests to ascertain
the extent to which existing measures of transitory poverty are driven by
period-specific stochastic changes in income and, thus, would overstate underlying
poverty dynamics.
3. Dynamic Poverty Measure. Should poverty measures distinguish
between the following: i) the same 50% of households are chronically poor;
and ii) 50% of households are poor at any one time, but who these 50% are
changes. This part of Felix’ research is theoretical in nature and aims
to extend common poverty measures to reflect the intertemporal distribution
of poverty among households.
4. Microeconomic Determinants of Inequality. This paper extends
Gary Fields’ technique of inequality decomposition to panel data to
examine what household assets and characteristics determine the level of income
inequality between households in rural Pakistan.
Working papers on most of these issues are available from Felix by email.
When not being an economist Felix’ time is occupied by one-year-old
Isabel (who has developed an ardent taste for nonparametric statistics books
– Yum!). Any remaining moments are spent cycling, skiing and playing
Latin American classical guitar.
(Some more about Felix at: http://myprofile.cos.com/fnaschold)