Tests using Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) unit record data from 2006/2007 to 2010/2011 indicate that Australian households on average insure against idiosyncratic income shocks. For a 10% change in income, non-durable expenditures change by 0.14%, while food...

Uncertainty is prevalent in the context of climate change impacts. Moreover, the distribution across the globe is not uniform. We analyze how climate risks could be reduced via an insurance scheme at the global scale across regions and quantify the potential welfare gains from such a scheme....

Extreme weather events and nuisance flooding are increasing, with communities already experiencing impacts. Both the identification of local hazards and the assessment of local vulnerabilities can protect people, their property, and their livelihoods. This paper provides an overview for local...

Preferences - concerning time, risk and social interactions - systematically shape human behavior, and contribute to differential economic and social outcomes between the genders. Here, we present a global investigation of gender differences in six fundamental preferences. Our data consist of...

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be exceptionally challenging for health care worldwide. Media and politicians currently pay attention to the ethical dilemma of distributing a prospective and potentially scarce COVID-19 vaccine. Meanwhile, physicians in intensive care units that are running...

The last two decades of the twentieth century recorded a slowdown in health gains and widespread increases in health inequality across and within countries. The paper explores the causes of such trends on the basis of five main mortality models. To do so, it regresses IMR/LEB on 15 determinants...

In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

In the age of globalization, the question whether inequality in the world rose or fell down, is a hot topic. Leading scholars in the field of economic inequality measurement developed methods to estimate empirically the distribution of welfare (income) amongst world citizens. Despite their...

This paper juxtaposes changes over the last forty years in income growth and distribution with the mortality changes recorded at the aggregate level in about 170 countries and at the individual level in 26 countries with at least two demographic and health surveys covering the last twenty years....