Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

Using a micro-level approach to poverty traps, this paper explores welfare dynamics among households in post-war rural Mozambique. Conceptually, the paper builds on an asset-based approach to poverty and tests empirically, with household panel data, for the existence of a poverty trap. Findings...

Two conversion schemes are usually employed for assessing personal-income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs.Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and...

We examine the determinants of low income transitions using first-order Markov models that control for initial conditions effects (those found to be poor in the base year may be a non-random sample) and for attrition (panel retention may also be non-random). Our econometric model is a form of...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes the dynamics of equivalent income in Germany in the eighties and nineties. Special emphasis is given to the separation of permanent and transitory components, the persistence of transitory shocks and their implications...

We examine the impact of family income during childhood on the type of secondary school that German children attend, a good indicator of their lifetime socioeconomic attainment. By contrast with several US child outcome studies, we find that late-childhood income is a more important determinant...

Based on a multiple spells approach, this paper studies the extent and the composition of chronic poverty in Germany. The results indicate that about one third of cross-sectional poverty in a given year is chronic. The characteristics that are most closely associated with long-term poverty are...

The purpose of this paper is to obtain by combining two longitudinal perspectives a more detailed national picture of poverty in the Member States of the European Union, using the first four waves (1994 - 1997) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). In addition to this detailed...

This paper deals with the question of selectivity of missing data on income questions in large panel surveys due to item-non-response and with imputation as one alternative strategy to cope with this issue. In contrast to cross-section surveys, the imputation of missing values in panel data can...

We provide an analytical framework within which changes in income inequality over time are related to the pattern of income growth across the income range, and the reshuffling of individuals in the income pecking order. We use it to explain how it was possible both for "the poor" to have fared...