The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) is arguably the most widely used alternative to gross domestic product for measuring national development. This is in large part due to its multidimensional nature, as it incorporates not only income, but also education and health. However, the...

We develop a methodology for modeling household income processes when subjective probabilistic assessments of future income are available. This allows us to flexibly estimate conditional cdfs directly using elicited individual subjective probabilities, and to obtain empirical measurements of...

Do non-traditional digital trace data and traditional survey data yield similar estimates of the impact of a cash transfer program? In a randomized controlled trial of Togo's COVID-19 Novissi program, endline survey data indicate positive treatment effects on beneficiary food security, mental...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic two new timely poverty measures have been developed to monitor fast-changing economic conditions for the most deprived. The Han et al. near real-time poverty measure uses responses to a global income question on the Monthly Current Population Survey (CPS)...

We review research on the dynamics and distribution of individual earnings and family income. We start with univariate earnings models, which dominate the literature and are often used as the exogenous component of family income in structural models of saving. We present a version of the linear...

Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey...

This paper studies intergenerational mobility--the transmission of family influence. We develop and estimate measures of lifetime resources (income and wealth) motivated by economic theory that account for generational differences in life-cycle trajectories, uncertainty, and credit constraints....

Since the mapping of the human genome in 2004, biologists have demonstrated genetic links to the expression of several income-enhancing physical traits. To illustrate how heredity produces intergenerational economic effects, this study uses one trait, beauty, to infer the extent to which...

One hallmark of U.S. monetary policy since the early 1980s has been moderation in inflation (at least, until recently). How has this affected household well-being? The paper first develops a new model to address this issue. The inflation tax on income is defined as the difference between the...

This paper studies intergenerational mobility--the transmission of family influence. We develop and estimate measures of lifetime resources motivated by economic theory that account for differences in life-cycle trajectories, and uncertainty about future income. We identify the effects of...