In this paper, social mobility is measured by looking at the extent to which family background determines socioeconomic success. An index of social mobility for developing countries is proposed based on the correlation of schooling gaps between siblings.

This paper presents microeconomic simulation techniques to examine what drives differences in inequality across countries. The simulation decomposes cross-country inequality differences into the importance of individual decisions, such as fertility, mating, labor force participation, and...

This study assesses whether recent changes in family structure and female employment patterns have altered the distribution of income in some countries. Extant literature on this topic reaches inconsistent conclusions and overwhelmingly focuses on the United States. To address these...

Using microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study, we assess 'time crunch' for families with children in Canada, Germany, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S. Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that both time and money are important inputs to the well-being of parents and children. We present...

Die geringe Geburtenrate in Deutschland wird die künftige gesellschaftliche und gesamtwirtschaftliche Entwicklung erheblich beeinflussen. Damit rückt auch die ökonomische Situation der Familienhaushalte in das Interesse der Öffentlichkeit. Immer häufiger wird gefordert - gestützt auf...

In an age when there is considerable focus on the needs and rights of children, it is perhaps a little surprising that parental income still mostly determines the standard of living that children enjoy. This has important implications, not just in terms of overall levels of welfare for children,...

This paper proposes a method to decompose earnings inequality into a component due to unequal opportunities and a residual term. Drawing on the distinction between 'circumstance' and 'effort' variables in John Roemer's work on equality of opportunity, we associate inequality of opportunities...

Change in income inequality in Taiwan from 1964 to 1995 is sensitive to how household incomes are adjusted for household composition. The reasonable practice of dividing household income by persons (or adults) in the household eliminates the widely noted increase in income inequality from 1980...

This paper investigates the importance of family borrowing constraints in determining human capital investments in children at early and late ages. We begin by providing new evidence from the Children of the NLSY (CNLSY) which suggests that borrowing constraints bind for at least some families...

Past estimates of the effect of family income on child development have often been plagued by endogeneity and measurement error. In this paper, we use an instrumental variables strategy to estimate the causal effect of income on children's math and reading achievement. Our identification derives...