Poverty Traps

Samuel Bowles is Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Economics at the University of Siena. Steven N. Durlauf is Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Karla Hoff is a Senior Research Economist at the World Bank.

"The collection is a thought-provoking book that provides a comprehensive examination of persistent poverty in both the United States and developing counties... Poverty Traps should be read by any economist, social scientist, policymaker, or anyone else interested in the study of persistent poverty."--William Levernier, Journal of Regional Science

• Acknowledgments vii Introduction by Samuel Bowles, Steven N. Durlauf, and Karla Hoff 1 Part One: Threshold Effects 15 Chapter 1: The Theory of Poverty Traps What Have We Learned? by Costas Azariadis 17 Part Two: by Institutions 41 Chapter 2: The Persistence of Poverty in the Americas The Role of Institutions by Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff 43 Chapter 3: Parasites by Halvor Mehlum, Karl Moene, and Ragnar Torvik 79 Chapter 4: The Kin System as a Poverty Trap? byKarla Hoff and Arijit Sen 95 Chapter 5: Institutional Poverty Traps by Samuel Bowles 116 Part Three: Neighborhood Effects 139 Chapter 6: Groups, Social Influences, and Inequality by Steven N. Durlauf 141 Chapter 7: Durable Inequality Spatial Dynamics, Social Processes, and the Persistence of Poverty in Chicago Neighborhoods by Robert J. Sampson and Jeffrey D. Morenoff 176 Chapter 8: Spatial Concentration and Social Stratification Does the Clustering of Disadvantage "Beget " Bad Outcomes?? by Michael E. Sobel 204 Contributors 231 Index 233