Underlying the unresolved debate over whether the gap between rich and poor country GNP per capita has narrowed is a concern for wellbeing. The issue is really about the changing shapes of distributions of wellbeing indicators. As limiting cases con- vergence between rich and poor country groups...

The problem considered here is that of dealing with the "incompleteness" property of Stochastic Dominance Orderings by quantifying the extent to which distributions differ when there is no dominant distribution at a given order. For example consider a policymaker's choice problem when facing a...

China's One Child Policy (OCP), introduced in 1979, changed fundamentally the nature of both existing and anticipated marriage arrangements and influenced family formation decisions in many dimensions, especially with respect to the number of and investment in children. The policy coincided with...

The Chinese government implemented the One Child Policy (OCP) in an attempt to ameliorate the population explosion and its potential negative economic consequences on their infant economy in 1979. Here the consequences of this policy for marital matching and family size decisions are examined. A...

Interest in Economic and Social Mobility is rooted in a societal aspiration for equal opportunity. The aspiration is based upon an Egalitarian Political Philosophy which approves of differential outcomes when they are the consequence of differential effort and disapproves of differential...

This paper introduces an index that facilitates the testing of differing matching theories based on the degree of overlap between a theoretically generated matching joint density and its empirical counterpart. The index is asymptotically Normal, consequently permitting inference. To demonstrate...

This paper proposes a convenient measure of the degree of distributional overlap, both parametric and nonparametric, useful in measuring the degree of Polarization, Alienation, and Convergence. We show the measure is asymptotically normally distributed, making it amenable to inference in...

This paper explores some difficulties encountered in multidimensional measures of wellbeing. In particular, it highlights the need for such indices to (i) incorporate information on individual preferences, (ii) be robust with respect to estimation assumptions given the 'curse of dimensionality'...

This paper develops a methodology for nonparametric estimation of a polarization measure due to Anderson Ge and Leo (2006) based on kernel estimation techniques. We give the asymptotic theory of our estimator, which in some cases is non standard due to boundary value problems. We also propose a...