van der Weide, Roy

Person:
van der Weide, Roy

Development Research Group

Fields of Specialization

Poverty and inequality mapping, Inequality, Poverty reduction, Welfare measurement, Spatial econometrics

Departments

Development Research Group

Last updated: April 29, 2025

Biography

Roy van der Weide is a Senior Economist in the Poverty and Inequality Research team in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. He leads the poverty and inequality mapping research within the department. His other research focuses on economic inequality, socio-economic mobility, and the transmission of price inflation and volatility. His work has been published in a range of academic journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Econometrics, and the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Since 2020, he is a co-editor of the World Bank Economic Review. He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 22

Non-Normal Empirical Bayes Prediction of Local Welfare
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-28) Elbers, Chris; Van der Weide, Roy
Estimates of the area- and household idiosyncratic error distributions from household income and consumption regression models across 142 household surveys from 16 different countries, the type of models that underpin poverty maps, points to significant deviations from normality. Accounting for non-normality in Empirical Best estimation of local welfare is found to increase precision relative to normal-Empirical Best estimation. Although the gains in precision range between meaningful and marginal, it is always positive. Given that non-normal-Empirical Best estimation is furthermore easy to implement, there is no downside to using it.
Gender, Social Support, and Political Speech: Evidence from Twitter
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-15) Heath, Rachel; van der Weide, Roy
Despite evidence that women’s political preferences differ from those of men, women are less likely to participate in political and social discussions on Twitter and other social media. Following recent evidence that in-person social support matters for women’s political participation, women are hypothesized to form similarly supportive communities online. This paper tests this hypothesis using data from Twitter. The collected data comprises 451 hashtags on a broad range of (non-mutually exclusive) topics: social, gender, racial, LGBTQ, religion, youth, education, economic, health, COVID, climate, political, security, entertainment and lifestyle, and the Middle East and Northern Africa. The empirical results indicate that women are more likely to participate when the debate(s) feature female influential voices. This finding supports the potential role of mutual support in bolstering women’s participation in important debates.
Intergenerational Mobility around the World
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Ramasubbaiah, Rakesh; van der Weide, Roy; Lakner, Christoph; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Narayan, Ambar
Using individual data from over 400 surveys, this paper compiles a global database of intergenerational mobility in education for 153 countries covering 97 percent of the world’s population. For 87 percent of the world’s population, it provides trends in intergenerational mobility for individuals born between 1950 to 1989. The findings show that absolute mobility in education—the share of respondents that obtains higher levels of education than their parents—is higher in the developed world despite the higher levels of parental educational attainment. Relative mobility—measuring the degree of independence between parent and child years of schooling—is also found to be greater in the developed world. Together, these findings point to severe challenges in intergenerational mobility in the poorest parts of the world. Beyond national income levels, the paper explores the correlation between intergenerational mobility and a variety of country characteristics. Countries with higher rates of mobility have (i) higher tax revenues and rates of government expenditures, especially on education; (ii) better child health indicators (less stunting and lower infant mortality); (iii) higher school quality (more teachers per pupil and fewer school dropouts); and (iv) less residential segregation.
Fair Progress?: Economic Mobility Across Generations Around the World
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-05-09) Narayan, Ambar; Van der Weide, Roy; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Lakner, Christoph; Redaelli, Silvia; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Ramasubbaiah, Rakesh Gupta N.; Thewissen, Stefan
Fair Progress? Economic Mobility Across Generations Around the World looks at an issue that has gotten much attention in the developed world, but with, for the first time, new data and analysis covering most of the world, including developing economies. The analysis examines whether those born in poverty or in prosperity are destined to remain in the same economic circumstances into which they were born, and looks back over a half a century at whether children’s lives are better or worse than their parents’ in different parts of the world. It suggests local, national, and global actions and policies that can help break the cycle of poverty, paving the way for the next generation to realize their potential and improve their lives.
Does Race and Gender Inequality Impact Income Growth?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11) Marrero, Gustavo A.; Rodríguez, Juan Gabriel; van der Weide, Roy
Using Integrated Public Use Microdata Series–United States micro-census data from 1960 to 2010, this paper examines whether racial and gender income disparities beget inequality by differentially impacting the growth prospects of the poor, the middle class, and the rich. Racial and gender inequality is found to be bad for income growth of the poor, but not for that of the rich. An investigation into the channels of this effect suggests that higher racial and gender inequality is associated with lower human capital accumulation among the poor and a reduction in the quality of their jobs.
Is Predicted Data a Viable Alternative to Real Data?
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06) Fujii, Tomoki; van der Weide, Roy
It is costly to collect the household- and individual-level data that underlie official estimates of poverty and health. For this reason, developing countries often do not have the budget to update estimates of poverty and health regularly, even though these estimates are most needed there. One way to reduce the financial burden is to substitute some of the real data with predicted data by means of double sampling, where the expensive outcome variable is collected for a subsample and its predictors for all. This study finds that double sampling yields only modest reductions in financial costs when imposing a statistical precision constraint in a wide range of realistic empirical settings. There are circumstances in which the gains can be more substantial, but these denote the exception rather than the rule. The recommendation is to rely on real data whenever there is a need for new data and to use prediction estimators to leverage existing data.
Inequality is Bad for Growth of the Poor (but Not for That of the Rich)
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2018-10) van der Weide, Roy; Milanovic, Branko
The paper investigates the relationship between income inequality and future income growth rates of households at different points of the income distribution. The analysis uses micro-census data from U.S. states covering the period from 1960 to 2010, and controls for exposure to imports from China and share of routine jobs, among other variables. It finds evidence that high levels of inequality reduce the income growth of the poor but, if anything, help the growth of the rich.
Obstacles on the Road to Palestinian Economic Growth
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) Blankespoor, Brian; van der Weide, Roy; Abrahams, Alexei; Rijkers, Bob
This paper quantifies the impact of market access on local GDP in the West Bank, proxied by nighttime lights, using the deployment of road closure obstacles by the Israeli army between 2005 and 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment generating exogenous temporal and spatial variation in accessibility. Minimum travel times between locality pairs are computed using road network and obstacles data supplemented with information on checkpoint traversal times. These are combined with population data to construct a time-varying market access measure for each locality. Market access has a significant and substantial effect on local light emissions. This association is robust to controlling for conflict, and strengthens when market access is instrumented by the number of obstacles located in a radius between 10 and 25km away from the locality.
Approximating Income Distribution Dynamics Using Aggregate Data
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06) Kraay, Aart; Van der Weide, Roy
This paper proposes a methodology to approximate individual income distribution dynamics using only time series data on aggregate moments of the income distribution. Under the assumption that individual incomes follow a lognormal autoregressive process, this paper shows that the evolution over time of the mean and standard deviation of log income across individuals provides sufficient information to place upper and lower bounds on the degree of mobility in the income distribution. The paper demonstrates that these bounds are reasonably informative, using the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics where the panel structure of the data allows us to compare measures of mobility directly estimated from the micro data with approximations based only on aggregate data. Bounds on mobility are estimated for a large cross-section of countries, using data on aggregate moments of the income distribution available in the World Wealth and Income Database and the World Bank's PovcalNet database. The estimated bounds on mobility imply that conventional anonymous growth rates of the bottom 40 percent (top 10 percent) that do not account for mobility substantially understate (overstate) the expected growth performance of those initially in the bottom 40 percent (top 10 percent).
Is Inequality Underestimated in Egypt? Evidence from House Prices
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06) van der Weide, Roy; Lakner, Christoph; Ianchovichina, Elena
Household income surveys often fail to capture top incomes which leads to an underestimation of income inequality. A popular solution is to combine the household survey with data from income tax records, which has been found to result in significant upward corrections of inequality estimates. Unfortunately, tax records are unavailable in many countries, including most of the developing world. In the absence of data from tax records, this study explores the feasibility of using data on house prices to estimate the top tail of the income distribution. In an application to Egypt, where estimates of inequality based on household surveys alone are low by international standards, the study finds strong evidence that inequality is indeed being underestimated by a considerable margin. The Gini index for urban Egypt is found to increase from 36 to 47 after correcting for the missing top tail.