This paper examines the consequences of social security reform for the inequality of consumption across individuals. The idea is that inequality is at least in part the result of individual risk in earnings or asset returns, the effects of which accumulate over time to increase inequality within...

People whose family income was less than $5,000 in 1980 could expect to live about 25 percent fewer years than people whose family income was greater than $50,000. We explore this finding using both individual data and a panel of aggregate birth cohorts observed from 1975 to 1995. We assume that...

We investigate age-specific mortality in Britain and the United States since 1950. Neither trends in income nor in income inequality provide plausible explanations. Britain and the US had different patterns of income growth but similar patterns of mortality decline. Patterns of income inequality...

Poverty counts are counts of individuals in poverty but are calculated from household or family data on income or expenditure. The transition from one to the other requires assumptions about intrahousehold allocation, about differences in needs across different people, and about the extent of...

We show that standard models of intertemporal choice, including the permanent income hypothesis, imply that for any given cohort of people born at the same time, inequality in both consumption and income will grow with age. At any given date, each individual's consumption depends on the integral...

This paper examines whether the observed cross-country correlation between aggregate saving rates and economic growth can be explained by models in which higher growth increases saving rates, rather than the other way around. The paper focusses on two explanations of why growth might increase...

What is inequality in health? Are economists' standard tools for measuring income inequality relevant or useful for measuring it? Does income protect health and does income inequality endanger it? I discuss two different concepts of health inequality and relate each of them to the literature on...

The paper considers avariety of evidence that casts light on the validity of the life-cycle model of consumer behavior. In the first part of the paper, simple non-parametric tests are used to examine representative agent models of consumption and labor supply. It seems extremely unlikely that...

Randomized controlled trials have been used in economics for 50 years, and intensively in economic development for more than 20. There has been a great deal of useful work, but RCTs have no unique advantages or disadvantages over other empirical methods in economics. They do not simplify...

There is a widespread belief that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased global income inequality, reducing per capita incomes by more in poor countries than in rich. This supposition is reasonable but false. Rich countries have experienced more deaths per head than have poor countries; their...