Although urban China has experienced spectacular income growth over the last two decades, increases in inequality, reduction in social welfare provision, deregulation of grain prices, and increases in income uncertainty in the 1990s have increased urban poverty. Using a large repeated...

We develop a model of the interdependencies between migration, remittances and inequality, and investigate how migration and subsequent remittances affect inter-household inequality in the origin communities. An important feature of our model is that we take into account the impact of migration...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes the dynamics of equivalent income in Germany in the eighties and nineties. Special emphasis is given to the separation of permanent and transitory components, the persistence of transitory shocks and their implications...

The goal of scientific work is to understand more and more by less and less. In this effort, theoretical unification plays a large part. There are two main types of theoretical unification – unification of different theories of the same field of phenomena and unification of theories of...

In this article we queantify the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of two revenue neutral flat-tax reforms using a model economy that replicates the U.S. distributions of earnings, income and wealth in very much detail. We find that the less progressive reform brings about a 2.4...

Using panel data for the Netherlands, Germany and the UK for seven years in the late 1980s and early 1990s the paper examines the comparative evidence on longitudinal income and persistent poverty for the three countries. Elaborating on the existing methodological literature of income dynamics,...

German and United States data from the Luxembourg Income Study are used to compare the relative economic well-being of Germans and Americans in the 1980s. In our analysis we use both official equivalence scales and consumption-based country-specific equivalence scales developed for Germany and...

Cholera and other diarrheal diseases are the second leading cause of death among the poor globally. The tragedy of this statistic is that it need not be the case. Unlike many afflictions, the impact of cholera can be greatly reduced, if not eliminated, through the collective action of clean...

This paper processes 76 household surveys from 17 Latin American countries to document changes in poverty and inequality during the 1990s, and performs an analysis of the effect of economic reforms on inequality and poverty by using an expanded data base of 94 surveys spanning the 1977-2000...