Much of America's promise is predicated on economic mobility - the idea that people are not limited or defined by where they start, but can move up the economic ladder based on their efforts and accomplishments. Family income mobility - changes in individual families' income positions over time...

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....

Aphorisms that "Rising tides raise all boats" or that material advances of the rich eventually "Trickle Down" to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income/wellbeing paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications for the...

Despite the formal rigour that attends social and economic measurement, the substantive meaning of particular measures could be compromised in the absence of a clear and coherent conceptualization of the phenomenon being measured. A case in point is afforded by the status of a "focus axiom" in...

This paper reviews the pattern of poverty rates and income inequality in El Salvador since the 1990s. It discusses some of the likely factors that explain the reduction in income inequality that has taken place in the country in the last decade, which paradoxically has coincided with the long...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....

Since 1994, a great deal has been accomplished. We argue that poverty reduction was temporarily sidelined in the 2000s. A series of shocks, especially the fuel and food price crisis of 2008, combined with poor productivity growth in agriculture and a weather shock, undermined progress in...

People who are unable to maintain the same standard of living as others around them experience a sense of relative deprivation that has been shown to reduce feelings of well-being. Relative deprivation reflects conditions of worsening relative poverty despite striking reductions in absolute...

Headcount measures of poverty are by far the most common tools for evaluating poverty and gauging progress in global development goals. The headcount ratio, or the prevalence of poverty, and the headcount, or the number of the poor, both convey tangible information about poverty. But both ignore...

The majority of the world's poor, by income poverty and multi-dimensional poverty, now live in countries officially classified by the World Bank as middle-income countries. Of course nothing happens when a country crosses a (somewhat) arbitrary threshold in per capita income but it does matter...