While the allocative efficiency of mobility is typically considered to be positive but small in the long run, the induced changes in equality may be considerable in size. In practice, however, migrants typically improve their income position in comparison to those at home, stimulate the economic...

This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs. This research advances the economic policy evaluation literature beyond estimating assorted mean impacts to estimate distributions of outcomes generated by different policies and determine...

Eating requires the food materials that make up meals and also time devoted to buying food, preparing meals and eating them, and cleaning up afterwards. Using time-diary and expenditure data for the U.S. for 1985 and 2003, I examine how income and time prices affect time and goods inputs into...

This paper asks how income distribution affects individual well-being and tries to explore the idea that this relation depends on the degree of mobility and uncertainty in the economy. It mostly concentrates on the relation between satisfaction and reference income (defined as the income of...

This paper uses sequential stochastic dominance procedures to compare the joint distribution of health and income across space and time. It is the first application of which we are aware of methods to compare multidimensional distributions of income and health using procedures that are robust to...

This paper surveys major empirical regularities concerning changes in earnings inequality in Europe and the U.S. over the past 25 years. Next, it indicates which of these regularities can be explained within the competitive demand-supply framework of analysis and what is left unexplained....

This paper analyzes the interaction between intergenerational wealth transmission, human capital investments under uninsurable labor income risk, and economic growth in a small open overlapping-generations economy with heterogeneous agents. It demonstrates how the role of the personal income...

In this paper, we analyze the extent to which market forces create an incentive for cloning human beings. We show that a market for cloning arises if a large enough fraction of the clone?s income can be appropriated by its model. Only people with the highest ability are cloned, while people at...

I study a model where Information Technology, while typically increasing overall inequality, is likely to harm some people at intermediate and high levels of the distribution of income but to benefit people at the bottom. Within a given occupation it may harm some workers while benefitting...

This paper develops methods for decomposing changes in the income distribution using subgroup decompositions of the income density function. Overall changes are related to changes in subgroup shares and changes in subgroup densities, where the latter are broken down further using elementary...