Permanent Income,Current Income,and Consumption

This article reexamines the consistency of the permanent-income hypothesis with aggregate postwar U.S. data. The permanent-income hypothesis is nested within a more general model in which a fraction of income accrues to individuals who consume their current income rather than their permanent income. This fraction is estimated to be about 50%, indicating a substantial departure from the permanent-income hypothesis. Our results cannot be easily explained by time aggregation or small-sample bias, by changes in the real interest rate, or by nonseparabilities in the utility function of consumers.     

我国35个大中城市房价-持久收入比研究

房价收入比是反映居民购房可支付能力的重要指标。为了更真实准确反映我国居民长期承受的购房负担,本文基于持久收入假说,利用我国35个大中城市数据,建立状态空间模型,估计出持久收入意义下的房价收入比,通过情景分析确定其合理上限,并分析主要特征。研究表明：①我国房价-持久收入比的合理上限为7.6,2002-2013年35个大中城市的房价-持久收入比均值是9.2,其中28个城市已超过该上限,比值最高的北京已达到14.9;②城市越发达,则房价-持久收入比越高,居民需要承受的购房压力越大,且在时间趋势上,一线与二三线城市间的差距呈现扩大趋势;③在地理分布上,我国东部、中部、东北地区、西部大中城市的房价-持久收入比呈现从高到低的排列顺序;④相比于传统方法中根据可支配收入测算的房价收入比,房价-持久收入比与其约有10%的差异。当前我国政府应采取有效措施继续限制房价,减轻居民购房负担。     

Adjusted Estimates of the Size Distribution of Family Money Income

This article describes the effects on estimates of the size distribution of family-unit money income produced by adjusting CPS estimates for 1972 by adding several other data sources. Income estimates were adjusted on an individual-observation basis to make them consistent with independent control totals. As a result of these adjustments, mean income for all units rose 12 percent. The relative share of the top 5 percent increased substantially. Property income increased and wage income decreased in relative importance. The adjustment to mean income was largest for the oldest age group and smallest for the youngest age group.     

Measuring Social Tension from Income Class Segregation

We develop an index that effectively measures the level of social tension generated by income class segregation. We adopt the basic concepts of between-group difference (or alienation) and within-group similarity (or identification) from the income [bi]polarization literature; but we allow for asymmetric degrees of between-group antagonism in the alienation function, and construct a more effective identification function using both the relative degree of within-group clustering and the group size. To facilitate statistical inference, we derive the asymptotic distribution of the proposed measure using results from U-statistics. As the new measure is general enough to include existing income polarization indices as well as the Gini index as special cases, the asymptotic result can be readily applied to these popular indices. Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data suggests that, while the level of social tension shows an upward trend over the sample period of 1981 to 2005, government’s taxes and transfers have been effective in reducing the level of social tension significantly.     

基于持久收入和财富目标的跨时消费选择——中国城市居民消费行为的实证研究

 摘　　要:标准生命周期消费理论假定消费者有能力求解复杂的动态优化问题，这一假定至少在中国是不能成立的。本文从中国实际出发，提出了关于中国城市居民消费行为的基本假设。即由于存在信贷约束和消费支出高峰，中国城市居民跨时消费的理性选择是：在避免未来发生流动性约束的前提下尽可能平滑各个时期的消费。与之相对应，本文假定中国城市居民跨时消费决策的主要依据是财富目标和持久收入，并在此基础上构建了经济计量模型。实证分析的主要结论是：（1）1990年以来，随着城市居民财富目标的不断提高，持久收入的边际消费倾向呈持续下降趋势。（2）中国城市居民的消费行为的确存在一个学习和适应过程。     

收入基尼系数的统计推断

 基尼系数估计量的统计推断是基尼系数研究的一个重点。本文我们使用Davidson（2009）提出的近似大样本渐进分布方法,对收入基尼系数估计量进行统计推断,包括计算估计量的标准差、构造置信区间和进行假设检验。通过模拟试验,我们验证了在小样本情形下,依据该方法所做的统计推断具有较高的可靠性。在此基础上,我们对我国城镇居民的真实收入基尼系数进行了统计推断。     

非线性定价、家庭人口特征和收入再分配效应调整

本文以分时阶梯定价为例,在人口老龄化及生育政策逐渐放宽的背景下,通过建立结构计量模型,实证分析了引入家庭人口特征后,非线性定价对收入再分配效应这一政策目标的影响。通过构建引入家庭人口特征的二次近乎理想需求（QUAIDS）函数,基于相对等价补偿方法建立收入再分配效应调整的测度模型。估计了为保持相同效用增加家庭不同类型的人口需要增加的电费补偿率及其金额。研究结论表明,引入家庭人口特征后收入再分配效应得到了强化;家庭人口特征对消费者行为选择有显著影响;不同人口规模的家庭的电费补贴结构存在明显差异;动态分析显示,随着预算水平的提高,家庭人口特征对收入再分配效应的影响在减小。     

Income inequality versus utility inequality

Bentham (1789 Bentham, J. (1789). Utilitarianism, reproduced by Nabu Public Domain Reprints. Available at: http://www.publicdomainreprints.org. [Google Scholar]) introduced utility as the pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in his philosophical view as existing if “pleasure” predominated over “pain.” This paper is the first to derive and compare the relative frequency distributions of income and utility in Bentham's classical sense. A utility-based Gini coefficient is formulated from a utility distribution derived from the better known income distribution. A utility-based Lorenz curve is defined as the accumulated sum of pain and pleasure, as Bentham defined them. A utility-based polarization index is created as the ratio of accumulated pain to accumulated pleasure. If raw income data are unavailable, an income distribution can still be estimated from a summary inequality statistic such as the Gini coefficient using the maximum entropy method. In this study, a measure of true income inequality, utility inequality, and the “pain” suffered by the poorest group are quantified and estimated using National Tax Service data from Korea.     

Relative Price Changes and Inequality in the Size Distribution of Various Components of Income

This article uses a comprehensive model of economic inequality to examine the impact of relative price changes on inequality in the marginal distributions of various income components in which the marginal distributions are derived from a multidimensional joint distribution. The multidimensional joint distribution function is assumed to be a member of the Pearson Type VI family; that is, it is assumed to be a beta distribution of the second kind. The multidimensional joint distribution is so called because it is a joint distribution of components of income and expenditures on various commodity groups. Gini measures of inequality are devised from the marginal distributions of the various income components. The inequality measures are shown to depend on the parameters of the multidimensional joint distribution. It is then shown that the parameters of the multidimensional joint distribution depend on the relative prices of various commodity groups and several other specified exogenous variables. Thus, knowledge of how changes in relative prices affect the parameters of the multidimensional joint distribution is deductively equivalent to knowledge of how changes in relative prices affect inequality in the marginal distributions of various components of income. It is found that relative price changes have a statistically significant impact on inequality in various components of income.     

人口分布的相对变化对我国地区间收入趋同的影响研究

本文利用省级面板数据研究了人口分布的相对变化对我国地区间收入趋同的影响。修正后的 -趋同分析结果显示,1978-2010年,我国地区间总收入和人均收入都表现为趋同模式,但人均收入的趋同速度比总收入趋同速度大约快16%。为了考察这一趋同速度上的差异,我们使用偏离—份额分析法考察了人口分布的相对变化对地区人均收入趋同过程的影响。分析结果表明,地区间人均收入趋同与人口分布的相对变化有显著关系。     

个人所得税、减贫效应与居民收入增长的相对益贫性

本文结合国际前沿收入分配测度方法,基于贫困增长曲线（poverty growth curve,PGC）和收入增长相对益贫性（Relative pro-poorness of Growth,RPG）测度指标,应用2013年发布的新一轮中国健康与营养调查（CHNS）微观数据,从居民收入增长的相对益贫性这一新视角分析个人所得税的减贫效应及其对中国城乡居民收入分配的影响,由此阐释个人所得税对居民收入增长相对益贫性的影响机理,并得到更具针对性的个人所得税政策启示。     

Application of Anbar's Approach to Hypothesis Testing to Detect the Difference between Two Proportions

In this paper, Anbar's (1983) approach for estimating a difference between two binomial proportions is discussed with respect to a hypothesis testing problem. Such an approach results in two possible testing strategies. While the results of the tests are expected to agree for a large sample size when two proportions are equal, the tests are shown to perform quite differently in terms of their probabilities of a Type I error for selected sample sizes. Moreover, the tests can lead to different conclusions, which is illustrated via a simple example; and the probability of such cases can be relatively large. In an attempt to improve the tests while preserving their relative simplicity feature, a modified test is proposed. The performance of this test and a conventional test based on normal approximation is assessed. It is shown that the modified Anbar's test better controls the probability of a Type I error for moderate sample sizes.     

家庭收入跨地区比较的潜变量分析

针对居民家庭消费与社会经济状况调查中户主自报的家庭固定收入可信程度差以及不同地区的不可比问题,利用陕西省2008年第四次国家卫生服务调查数据,将自报的家庭收入作为不能准确测量的潜变量,运用DIHOPIT模型确定反映家庭收入高低的指示变量,通过不同地区共同的指示变量,用相同或近似的指示变量作为截断点评价不同地区家庭收入的差别。用陕西省城乡6个县(区)的调查数据拟合模型,发现在众多的指示变量中,"电话类型"为5个县(区)共同指示变量,同时也发现部分指示变量在部分调查县(区)缺乏效度,需要在今后的调查问卷条目设计时做适当调整和补充。     

Some Sampling Properties of a Model for Income Distribution

A recently proposed model for describing the distribution of income over a population, based on the Burr distribution, has been shown to fit better than the commonly used lognormal or gamma distributions. The current article extends that analysis by deriving the large-sample properties of the maximum likelihood estimates for this three-parameter model. Consequently, resulting confidence intervals for some measures of income inequality (including the Gini index) are used to further test the model's validity, as well as to examine apparent trends in inequality over time. Since these properties depend on the way the income data are grouped and censored, implications for choosing data-report intervals can be analyzed. Specifically, a choice between two common methods of reporting the data is shown to have an important impact on Gini index estimates.     

中国农户消费消费混合性特征的统计研究

一、混合模型对于居民消费行为的研究 ,国内外众多学者致力于从理论上不断完善持久收入生命周期假说。 70年代中期 ,以自适应预期机制为基础的持久收入假设模型、生命周期模型的预测精度明显下降 ① 。霍尔 (Ｈａｌｌ1978)为克服这种困难 ,采用理性预期假说 ,用随机方法修正持久收入和生命周期假定 ,提出了理性预期生命周期假说 (ＬＣ ＰＩＨ) ② 。如果引入理性预期假说 ,那么持久收入生命周期假说意味着只有前期消费包含着能够预测现期消费的信息。但是 ,由于消费与现期收入存在正相关 ,即消费对现期收入具有过度敏感性 (Ｃａｍｐｂｅｌｌ…     

A Unified Approach to Estimating and Testing Income Distributions With Grouped Data

We propose a unified approach that is flexibly applicable to various types of grouped data for estimating and testing parametric income distributions. To simplify the use of our approach, we also provide a parametric bootstrap method and show its asymptotic validity. We also compare this approach with existing methods for grouped income data, and assess their finite-sample performance by a Monte Carlo simulation. For empirical demonstrations, we apply our approach to recovering China's income/consumption distributions from a sequence of income/consumption share tables and the U.S. income distributions from a combination of income shares and sample quantiles. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

中国居民代际收入流动效应研究

代际收入流动性是研究收入不平等代际传递的重要视角之一。文章讨论了公共服务质量对代际收入流动的影响机制,同时考虑劳动力迁移因素的作用,以劳动力迁移概率为局部工具变量进行Heckman两阶段回归,来考察代际收入的传递效应。估计结果显示:我国目前代际收入流动还处于较低水平;基本公共服务质量的提高能够有效改善代际收入流动,教育、医疗保险在传递路径中的贡献较大;劳动力迁移行为强化了教育等基本服务质量对代际收入流动的促进作用。政府应继续实施基本公共服务均等化政策,合理分配落后地区教育资源,放松限制劳动力流动的因素,加快完善相关社会保障制度。     

Testing linear hypotheses in high-dimensional regressions

For a multivariate linear model, Wilk's likelihood ratio test (LRT) constitutes one of the cornerstone tools. However, the computation of its quantiles under the null or the alternative hypothesis requires complex analytic approximations, and more importantly, these distributional approximations are feasible only for moderate dimension of the dependent variable, say p≤20. On the other hand, assuming that the data dimension p as well as the number q of regression variables are fixed while the sample size n grows, several asymptotic approximations are proposed in the literature for Wilk's Λ including the widely used chi-square approximation. In this paper, we consider necessary modifications to Wilk's test in a high-dimensional context, specifically assuming a high data dimension p and a large sample size n. Based on recent random matrix theory, the correction we propose to Wilk's test is asymptotically Gaussian under the null hypothesis and simulations demonstrate that the corrected LRT has very satisfactory size and power, surely in the large p and large n context, but also for moderately large data dimensions such as p=30 or p=50. As a byproduct, we give a reason explaining why the standard chi-square approximation fails for high-dimensional data. We also introduce a new procedure for the classical multiple sample significance test in multivariate analysis of variance which is valid for high-dimensional data.     

基于社会核算矩阵乘数的中国产业、居民相对收入分析

 本文使用社会核算矩阵(SAM)收入分配乘数及其分解方法,对中国2000年细分SAM进行了分析,研究了经济系统中产业部门、居民部门相对收入的变化,以及政府部门在收入分配过程中的作用,并分析了引起相对收入变化的构成。通过分析我们得出,从相对收入角度来说,大部分产业之间是非相互促进的;产业对居民相对收入的提高与居民的初始收入水平有较高的相关性;政府部门的投入会提高城镇居民的相对收入,但却会降低农村居民的相对收入。     

Income distribution in Italy: A nonparametric analysis

Using kernel density estimation, this paper describes the real income distribution and how it evolved over time in Italy. Data are cross-sectional samples from the population of Italian households during the period 1987–1998. A non parametric test is applied to asses whether the observed changes in the distribution are statistically significant, while the presence of more than one mode in the distributions is investigated by a bootstrap test. Empirical results show that the Italian income distribution significantly changed over time, accompanied by a decreasing inequality pattern until 1991 and a subsequent rise. No marked income gains were perceived, while the real “losers” of the decade seem to be households in the middle-upper income range. Supported by the MURST project 98-13-45. We would like to thank Nicholas Longford for his precious support and encouragement, two anonymous referees, the participants of the seminar at CEPS/INSTEAD in Luxembarg, and of the 40 ^th SIS Conference in Florence, for helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.