The impact of globalization and financial development on India’s income inequality

This paper empirically examines the combined effects of globalization and financial development on income inequality in a unified framework for an emerging economy. Using annual data for the Indian economy over the period 1980–2014, we show that the perceived benefits of globalization and financial development have not trickled down; rather, has aggravated income inequality. Our results also indicate that while inflation aggravates income inequality, education seems to alleviate the differential effect. Proactive measures in providing access to financial services, creating equitable employment opportunities, and improving the quality of education are required to offset the negative impacts of globalization and financial development on income disparity.     

An improved Bennett's inequality

This paper gives an improvement to Bennett's inequality for tail probability of sum of independent random variables, without imposing any additional condition. The improved version has a closed form expression. Using a refined arithmetic-geometric mean inequality, we further improve the obtained inequality. Numerical comparisons show that the proposed inequalities often improve the upper bound significantly in the far tail area, and these improvements get more prominent for larger sample size.     

Redistribution and labour supply

This paper explores the effect of personal income taxes on redistribution when labour supply reactions are taken into consideration. The results indicate that the classical non-behavioural results on redistribution are not necessarily satisfied in a more general behavioural framework. In this respect, it is shown that the relevant transition to measure redistribution is not the transition from the initial post-tax to the final post-tax income distribution, but rather from the more precise initial pre-tax to the final post-tax income distribution. In addition, the necessary and sufficient conditions to ensure redistribution in this wider setting are postulated, which helps determine the behavioural bias under alternative tax and labour supply models. This shows that the functional specification of labour supply may also affect the results.     

Race and Loss of Privilege: African American/White Differences in the Determinants of Job Layoffs From Upper-Tier Occupations

Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics supports predictions from the minority vulnerability thesis concerning the determinants of job layoffs among African Americans and Whites who work in upper-middle-class occupations. Specifically, after controlling for seniority, layoffs for African Americans are relatively unstructured by traditional stratification-based causal factors, namely, background socioeconomic status, human-capital credentials, and job/labor market characteristics. Analyses also indicate that racial differences in the determinants of layoffs are more pronounced in nonservice-based than service-based firms in the private sector and in the private sector relative to the public sector.     

Welfare Reform in Indiana: The Political Economy of Restricting Access to Education and Training

This article interrogates welfare reform policies that restrict welfare reliant mothers' access to education and training. It focuses on how these policies have been implemented through the Indiana Manpower Placement and Comprehensive Training Program (IMPACT), Indiana's work first response to women's growing experience of poverty. Using methods of inquiry inspired by Dorothy E. Smith's articulation of institutional ethnography, a case study is developed to investigate the critical disjuncture that arises when welfare reliant mothers attempt to navigate these policies in the context of Indiana's extended political economy. It is argued that through these restrictive policies, welfare reliant mothers are forced into Indiana's unrelenting low-wage labor market, increasing the pervasiveness of poverty and further perpetuating the reproduction of inequality.     

Dimensions of social inequality in the Third World

This cross-national assessment of the empirical determinants of income inequality and infant mortality employs policy-relevant variables suggested by the major macrosocial theories of development and stratification. Findings based on sample sizes ranging from 34 to 61 LDCs indicate that modernization and ecological-evolutionary theories provide more consistent explanations of social inequalities than either dependency/world-systems theory or urban bias theory. Our analyses point to economic growth and the development of rural infrastructure and social complexity as the most expedient methods for facilitating mortality reduction and income equalization. We conclude that simplistic policy-orientations stressing such phenomena as urban bias or population growth should be replaced by more complex perspectives that include an emphasis on rural social organization.     

Nonparametric confidence and tolerance intervals from record values data

In a number of situations only observations that exceed or only those that fall below the current extreme value are recorded. Examples include meteorology, hydrology, athletic events and mining. Industrial stress testing is also an example in which only items that are weaker than all the observed items are destroyed. In this paper, it is shown that, how record values can be used to provide distribution-free confidence intervals for population quantiles and tolerance intervals. We provide some tables that help one choose the appropriate record values and present a numerical example. Also universal upper bounds for the expectation of the length of the confidence intervals are derived. The results may be of interest in situation where only record values are stored.     

Gronwall不等式及其应用

本文介绍了Gronwall不等式及其推广,并将其应用于一阶常微分方程Cauchy初值问题的研究。     

The Distribution of Risks: Vehicle Occupant Fatalities and Time of the Week

Automobile accident risks vary significantly across populations, places, and times. This study describes the time-varying pattern of societal risk. The relative risks of occupant fatality per person-mile of travel are estimated here for each hour of the week, using 1983 data. The results exhibit a strong time-of-day effect and have a highly skewed frequency distribution, implying wide variations in risk-taking behavior. Indeed, the 168 hourly estimates ranged from a low of 0.32 times the average around Sunday noon to a high of 43 times the average at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday, i.e., by a factor of 134 from bottom to top. Quantile-quantile plots or "Lorenz curves," introduced to display the unequal distribution of risks, show that approximately 34% of the vehicle occupant fatalities occur in hours representing only 5% of the travel. These findings have serious implications for risk analysis. First, when attempting to reconcile objective and subjective risk estimates, risk communicators should carefully control for when and to whom the risk in question is applicable. Second, comparisons of hazards on the basis of average risk are necessarily misleading for risks distributed so unevenly. Third, resource allocation decisions can benefit by knowing how incidence, exposure, and risk vary across time, place, and other relevant variables. Finally, certain cost-benefit analyses that use average values to estimate risk exposure can be misleading.     

关于Liouville定理的注记

Liouville定理在复分析中十分重要,本文来用二种新法予以证明,并对它作适当推广。