Recent scholarship has revised the once pessimistic view of the Chinese economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but controversy surrounds the distribution effects of economic growth. Did livelihoods improve? Who benefited from the growth? Which regions were better off? Past studies...

Studies of the spatial dimensions of inequality in developing countries are mostly restricted to states, provinces, or districts, typically the smallest geographical units for which data are representative in national surveys. We introduce a procedure to calculate inequality between and within...

Economic growth over the past three decades has greatly improved nutrition and the standard of living of the Chinese. Increasingly, though, the Chinese are becoming heavier. As many as a quarter of Chinese school-age urban boys are overweight or obese, yet a third of Chinese children remain...

In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits has become an important concern in the policy debate. It turns out that there are strong variations in absence behavior between local geographical areas, and it has been difficult to explain these variations by...

In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits is an important concern in the policy debate. There are strong variations in absence behavior among local geographical areas. Such variations are difficult to explain in terms of observable socioeconomic factors. In this...

This study explores the consequences and origins of contemporary differences in well-being across ethnic groups within countries. We construct measures of ethnic inequality combining ethnolinguistic maps on the spatial distribution of groups with satellite images of light density at night....