Stochastic Dominance and Absolute Risk Aversion

In this paper, we propose the infimum of the Arrow–Pratt index of absolute risk aversion as a measure of global risk aversion of a utility function. We show that, for any given arbitrary pair of distributions, there exists a threshold level of global risk aversion such that all increasing concave utility functions with at least as much global risk aversion would rank the two distributions in the same way. Furthermore, this threshold level is sharp in the sense that, for any lower level of global risk aversion, we can find two utility functions in this class yielding opposite preference relations for the two distributions.This paper has benefited from insightful comments made by James Mirrless, two anonymous referees, and by seminar participants at IAE and Simposio de Análisis Económico in Salamanca. They should not bear any responsibility for the remaining errors. Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and FEDER through grants SEC2003-306 and SEC2003-1961, from the Generalitat of Catalonia through the Barcelona Economics program (CREA) and grants 2005SGR00447 and 2005SGR00626 is gratefully acknowledged. This paper is part of the “Polarization and Conflict” project, contract 3CIT2-CT-2004-506084 funded by the European Commission.     

Lorenz Dominance and Non-welfaristic Redistribution

Our concern is for income inequalities that may result from non-welfaristic redistribution schemes. We show that for large classes of income functions Lorenz dominance results can be found in the comparison of two egalitarian equivalent mechanisms. Comparisons of different conditionally egalitarian mechanisms only yield poverty dominance results. In general, no egalitarian equivalent mechanism can be Lorenz dominated by a conditionally egalitarian mechanism. Our analysis stresses the need for accurate empirical estimates of the pre-tax income function and of the distributions of responsibility and compensation characteristics. We thank the Editor, Marc Fleurbaey and two anonymous referees, Geert Dhaene and seminar/conference participants at UAP-workshop (Namur, 2003), ‘Welfarist and non-welfarist approaches to public economics’ (Ghent, 2004), SED (Palma, 2004), SSC&W (Osaka, 2004) and IIPF (Milan, 2004) for helpful comments and suggestions. Financial support from the Federal Public Planning Service Science Policy, Interuniversity Attraction Poles Program – Belgian Science Policy [Contract No. P5/21] is gratefully acknowledged.     

Income Mobility and the Earned Income Tax Credit

Households who work full-time at minimum wage jobs earn more than the phasein range of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). This means that the EITC mainly acts as a negative income tax. However, most families are eligible to receive the EITC for a relatively short time. Seventy-four percent of new EITC families will lose their eligibility in two years or less. Sixty-one percent of families already on the EITC will lose their eligibility in three years or less. EITC families are much more mobile than AFDC families. The main reason that families gain or lose EITC eligibility is changes in earnings.     

Deviance,Rule-Breaking and Male Dominance in Conversation

Previous research on dyadic interaction indicates that cross-sex conversations (male-female) are characterized by more frequent interruptions than same-sex conversations. More specifically, males consistently tend to interrupt their female co-conversationalists. Survey data from three student samples suggest that normative definitions reflected in perceptions of interruption are inconsistent with the empirical distribution of rule-breaking observed by conversational researchers. These results provide some strategic insights into the problematic distinction between deviance and rule-breaking that has been central to labeling theory.     

Jurisdictional Competition and the Psychoanalytic Dominance of American Psychiatry

Despite constituting only a small fraction of all psychiatrists, psychoanalysts rose to a position of dominance within American psychiatry in the post-World War Two era. This article explains their success. A review of the social and institutional context of psychoanalysis and psychiatry reveals that many factors were actually unfavorable to psychoanalysis, and several others were at best equivocal in their support of analysis. Neither income, status, the relationship between institutions and ideology, or other such factors accounts for the success. After describing these factors and showing how they do not work as explanations, I argue that psychoanalysis succeeded largely because of its utility to the psychiatric profession in the growing jurisdictional disputes with non-medical competitors, specifically clinical psychology.     

公共交通的社会共享

城市生活,包括就业、上学、购物、休闲娱乐等,都有赖于交通。所有的市民,包括弱势群体,都有这方面的需求,并且有权得到保障。只有建立一个高效、便捷、安全、可靠、环境友好,覆盖全市的公共交通系统,才能形成一个良好的交通环境,保持城市的活力,促进经济发展。     

Income and child development

We examine how income is associated with the home environments and the cognitive and behavioral development of pre-school children using data from a birth cohort study of children born at the end of the 20th century. Lower-income 3-year-old children are more likely than wealthier children to live in homes with inadequate physical environments and to have mothers who are more likely to be stressed, depressed, harsh and unresponsive. Additionally, low income children have lower PPVT scores, more mother-reported aggressive, withdrawn, and anxious behavior problems, and also more interviewer-reported problems with behavior, than more affluent children. A key policy question is whether increases in the incomes of poor families would result in improvements in children's outcomes, at least in part through improvements in the home environment. This question is difficult to answer using observational data. However, we argue that, even under the most generous interpretation of the associations we estimate, large income transfer programs would have relatively small effects on children's cognitive and behavioral outcomes.     

To Share or Not to Share: When Do Toddlers Respond to Another's Needs?

The developmental origins of sharing remain little understood. Using procedures adapted from research on prosocial behavior in chimpanzees, we presented 18- and 25-month-old children with a sharing task in which they could choose to deliver food to themselves only, or to both themselves and another person, thereby making it possible for them to share without personal sacrifice. The potential recipient, a friendly adult, was either silent about her needs and wants or made them explicit. Both younger and older toddlers chose randomly when the recipient was silent. However, when the recipient vocalized her desires 25-month-olds shared whereas younger children did not. Thus, we demonstrate that children voluntarily share valued resources with others by the end of the second year of life, but that this depends on explicit communicative cues about another's need or desire.     

人文奥运 情满京城(英文)

奥运会于北京,不仅仅是承办一届体育盛事,更是将其悠久历史与文化瑰宝向世界传播的窗口;于国人,不仅仅是分享参与盛事的喜悦,更是增进交流与提升自身的完美契机。人文奥运,因你我而精彩!     

Income inequality and self-reported values

What is the relationship between income inequality and the values people endorse? Using survey data from all thirty-four OECD countries over a period of almost thirty years, we investigate the following dimensions of value systems: work ethic, civism, obedience, honesty, altruism, and tolerance. In most cases, no robust relation to income inequality is detected. However, we find some evidence that larger income disparities are associated with a stronger work ethic. This suggests that income inequality might spur hard work not only through pecuniary incentives but also because it makes people attach a symbolic value to being laborious.     

Redistributing Income and Relative Efficiency

This article considers the relative efficiency of marginally redistributing income from high- to low-income households. Additional spending on a negative income tax is compared with spending on an earnings or a wage subsidy. One set of reforms imposes the same burden on the nonpoor, and another set redistributes the same net benefit to the working poor. Additional spending on a negative income tax is more efficient than spending a similar amount on an earnings subsidy (the Earned Income Tax Credit), for some reforms and parameters. The wage subsidy is the most efficient, independent of parameters or type of reform.     

中美经营者股票期权制度比较

"经营者股票期权"(Executive Stock Option-ESO),是指公司向主要经营者提供的一种在一定期限内按照某一既定价格购买一定数量本公司股份的权利。美国是最早推行经营者股票期权的国家。作为一种长期激励机制,经营者股票期权制度已经得到了西方许多国家的认可。我国从1999年开始在上海、武汉、北京和     

Income inequality and income segregation

This article investigates how the growth in income inequality from 1970 to 2000 affected patterns of income segregation along three dimensions: the spatial segregation of poverty and affluence, race-specific patterns of income segregation, and the geographic scale of income segregation. The evidence reveals a robust relationship between income inequality and income segregation, an effect that is larger for black families than for white families. In addition, income inequality affects income segregation primarily through its effect on the large-scale spatial segregation of affluence rather than by affecting the spatial segregation of poverty or by altering small-scale patterns of income segregation.     

Income inequality games

The paper explores different applications of the Shapley value for either inequality or poverty measures. We first investigate the problem of source decomposition of inequality measures, the so-called additive income sources inequality games, based on the Shapley value, introduced by Chantreuil and Trannoy (1999) and Shorrocks (1999). We show that multiplicative inequality games provide dual results compared with Chantreuil and Trannoy’s ones. We also investigate the case of multiplicative poverty games for which indices are non additively decomposable in order to capture contributions of sub-indices, which are multiplicatively connected with, as in the Sen-Shorrocks-Thon poverty index. We finally show, in the case of additive poverty indices, that the Shapley value may be equivalent to traditional methods of decomposition such as subgroup consistency and additive decomposition.     

Income Satisfaction Inequality and its Causes

In this paper, the concept of Income Satisfaction Inequality is operationalized on the basis of individual responses to an Income Satisfaction question posed in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Income satisfaction is the subjective analogue of the objective income concept. The paper introduces a method to decompose Income Satisfaction Inequality according to the contributions from variables such as income, education, and the number of children. Given the panel structure of the data, inequality may be attributed partly to permanent individual circumstances and partly to transitory changes. The paper shows that by far the largest part of the satisfaction inequality has to be ascribed to unobserved heterogeneity. Distinguishing between a structural and an unexplained part of inequality we find that income explains the largest part of structural Income Satisfaction Inequality together with household membership; for non-working individuals, the age distribution is very relevant as well.