Chapter from: 'Rising Inequality in China: Challenge to a Harmonious Society', edited by Shi Li, Hiroshi Sato and Terry Sicular.

This paper assesses the accuracy of decomposing income risk into permanent and transitory components using income and consumption data. We develop a specific approximation to the optimal consumption growth rule and use Monte Carlo evidence to show that this approximation can provide a robust...

In this paper we investigate earnings mobility in Austria from the angle of individual persons: earnings mobility over time has two aspects: positional changes and the volatility of earnings over time. Whereas the further is a positive outcome, more volatility as such can be seen as negative. We...

This article studies the long run patterns and explanations of wage mobility as a characteristic of regional labor markets. Using German administrative data we describe wage mobility since 1975 in West and since 1992 in East Germany. Wage mobility declined substantially in East Germany in the...

Mit Hinweis auf die künftige demographische Entwicklung und hohe Alterseinkommen von Rentnern werden Vorschläge zur Umverteilung zwischen den „Generationen“ zugunsten Jüngerer und zulasten Älterer begründet. Wie steht es um die Alterseinkommen jetzt und zukünftig in Deutschland?

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...

We examine the effect on inequality of increasing one income, and show that for two wide classes of indices a benchmark income level or position exists, dividing upper from lower incomes, such that if a lower income is raised, inequality falls, and if an upper income is raised, inequality rises....

This paper examines whether retirement-income systems allow older individuals to enjoy socially acceptable income levels independent of paid work (decommodification) and the family (defamilialization). Little research has investigated the degree to which decommodification and defamilialization...