Recent research has shown that 'rich' households save at much higher rates than others (see Carroll (2000); Dynan Skinner and Zeldes (1996); Gentry and Hubbard (1998); Huggett (1996); Quadrini (1999)) This paper documents another large difference between the rich and the rest of the population:...

Using a micro-level approach to poverty traps, this paper explores welfare dynamics among households in post-war rural Mozambique. Conceptually, the paper builds on an asset-based approach to poverty and tests empirically, with household panel data, for the existence of a poverty trap. Findings...

Using a collective model of consumption, we characterize optimal commodity taxes aimed at targeting speci…c individuals within the household. The main message is that distortionary indirect taxation can circumvent the agency problem of the household. Essentially, taxation should discourage...

This study analysed the contribution of economic growth and redistribution components to aggregate poverty changes in Ireland from 1987-2005, using the Shapley value decomposition approach. The analysis used the household disposable income data from the Household Budget Survey to calculate...

We provide an analytical-behavioral explanation for the observed positive relationship between income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, and the incentive to migrate. We show that a higher total relative deprivation of a population leads to a stronger incentive to engage in...

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed redistributive effect for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit...

In his seminal paper of 1928, Ramsey conjectured that if agents discounted the future differently, in the long run all agents except the most patient would live at the subsistence level. The validity of this conjecture was investigated in different environments. In particular, it has been...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...

This paper analyses data from the Irish Household Budget Surveys of 1987, 1994 and 1999 to examine the evolution of inequality of income and expenditure over that period. The paper calculates Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and also the Growth Incidence Curve of Ravallion and Chen to...

Medical expenditure risk can pose a major threat to living standards. We derive decomposable measures of catastrophic medical expenditure risk from reference-dependent utility with loss aversion. We propose a quantile regression based method of estimating risk exposure from cross-section data...