How the income of relevant others affects well-being has received renewed interest in the recent literature using subjective data. Migrants constitutes a particularly interesting group to study this question: as they changed environment, they are likely to be concerned by several potential...

Blood donation with compensation is considered as a social stigma. However, more people in the reference group donate blood often leads to less moral concern and more followers. Therefore, the behavior is likely to be influenced through one's interactions with neighbors, friends and relatives....

This paper tests using survey data from China whether individual health is associated with income and community-level income inequality. Although poor health and high inequality are key features of many developing countries, most of the earlier literature has drawn on data from developed...

Different family types may have a fixed flow of consumption costs, related to subsistence needs. We use a survey method in order to identify and estimate such a fixed component of spending for different families. Our method involves making direct questions about the linkup between aggregate...

The introduction of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in rural China is one of the largest health care reforms in the developing world since the millennium. The literature to date has mainly used the uneven rollout of NCMS across counties as a way of identifying its effects on access to care...

During the last decades, China has experienced double-digit economic growth rates and rising inequality. This paper implements a new decomposition on the China Health and Nutrition panel Survey (1991-2006) to examine the extent to which changes in level and distribution of incomes and in income...

In a recent paper in the Review of Economic Studies, Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray (Anderson and Ray, 2010) develop and apply a new 'flow' measure of 'missing women' to estimate the extent of gender bias in mortality in developing countries. Contrary to the existing literature, they find that...

This study explores the relationship between inequality and structural transformation by constructing a theoretical model, developing analytical frameworks, and implementing a case study. The general equilibrium model we develop demonstrates that inequality exhibits an inverted U shape as...

The existing literature on "missing women" has suggested that the problem is mostly concentrated in India and China, and mostly related to sex-selective abortions and post-birth neglect of female children. In a recent paper in the Review of Economic Studies, Anderson and Ray (AR) develop a new...

Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), this study analyses changes in bodyweight (BMI and waist circumference) distributions between 1991 and 2011 among adults aged 20+ in China. To do so, we quantify the source and extent of temporal changes in bodyweight and then...