How did industrialization in the nineteenth century affect the well-being of children among American working class families? Two revealing surveys from 1890 and 1907 are used to examine the implications of child labor on schooling decisions and on possible offsetting intrafamily transfers, in...

The growth in single-person households is a pervasive behavioral phenomenon in the United States in the post-war period. In this paper we investigate determinants of the propensity to live alone, using 1970 data across states for single men and women ages 25 to 34 and for elderly widows. Income...

The channels by which better health leads to higher income, and those by which higher income protects health status, are of interest to both researchers and policy makers. In general, quantifying the impact of income on health is difficult, given the simultaneous determination of health and...

This paper summarizes and critically evaluates what is known about postwar trends in both the level and distribution of economic well-being. Although certain non-income aspects of well-being are considered, the primary focus is on the level and inequality of income. Considerable attention is...

A large literature has documented a significant increase in the difference between the wage of college graduates and high school graduates over the past 30 years. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have experienced relatively larger increases in cost of living, because they have...

This paper investigates how material well-being has changed over time for those at the bottom of the distributions of income and consumption. We document the sharp differences between recent trends in measured income and consumption, focusing on families headed by a single mother. Since the...

This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of Jamaican standards of living and income inequality around 1774. To this purpose we compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose...

This paper presents new information on the fraction of adjusted gross income, and of wages and salaries, that is reported by taxpayers in the top one half of one percent of the income distribution. This corresponds to roughly five hundred thousand households in the late 1990s. This paper relies...

Low response rates among rich households are thought to be a serious problem in many applications using household surveys. The paper discusses the various ways the problem can be dealt with, and makes some recommendations for practice, including in developing countries. Under certain conditions,...