In this article, we explore nonlinearities in the intergenerational mobility process using threshold regression models. We uncover evidence of threshold effects in children's outcomes based on parental education and cognitive and noncognitive skills as well as their interaction with offspring characteristics. We interpret these thresholds as organizing dynastic earning processes into “status traps.” Status traps, unlike poverty traps, are not absorbing states. Rather, they reduce the impact of favorable shocks for disadvantaged children and so inhibit upward mobility in ways not captured by linear models. Our evidence of status traps is based on three complementary datasets; that is, the PSID, the NLSY, and US administrative data at the commuting zone level, which together suggest that the threshold-like mobility behavior we observe in the data is robust for a range of outcomes and contexts. 相似文献
How can higher education programs engage students in building a shared commons to address inequalities and foster commitment to intergroup collaboration? Intergroup dialogue is one such possibility to provide forums for meaningful engagement among students from diverse backgrounds. Findings from field experiments at nine colleges and universities show that students in intergroup dialogues increased significantly more than counterparts in control groups and social science comparison groups in their critiques of inequality and their commitments to post-college action to redress inequalities. Further, students in intergroup dialogues rated the frequency of the core communication processes more highly than the social science comparison students. The communication processes help account for the greater increase in students’ critiques of inequality and commitment to post-college actions. 相似文献
This essay surveys some of the work of the University of Texas Inequality Project, a small research group that for the past
decade has worked primarily to develop new measures of economic inequality, using a method based on the between-groups component
of Theil’s T statistic. In this way, inequality statistics can be computed from many diverse and mundane sources of information,
including regional tax collections, employment and earnings, census of manufacturing, and harmonized international industrial
data sets. The rich data environment so constructed permits new analyses of patterns of economic change, by region, by sector,
and by country, and broadly supports the idea that the movement of inequality is closely related to macroeconomic events at
the national and the global level.
I thank Ravi Kanbur for the invitation to submit this essay for consideration by the JOEI, and I thank the members of the
UTIP team for comments on the draft. 相似文献
In this paper we analyze the effect of inequality on school enrollment, preferred tax rate and expenditure per student in
developing countries; when parents can choose between child labor, public schooling or private schooling. We present a model
in which parents make schooling decisions for their children, weighing the utility benefit of having a child with formal public
or private education versus the forgone income from child labor or household work. Parents vote over the preferred tax rate
to finance freely provided public education. The utility benefit of an educated child is proportional to expenditure per student,
so that there is congestion in public school. We find that when parents can send their children to work or to private school,
high inequality leads to exit from public education at both ends of the income distribution. Thus high inequality reduces
the support for public education, leading to a low tax rate and expenditure per student. Exit from public education results
in both high child labor and a large fraction of students attending private school. In fact there is a threshold level of
inequality above which there is no longer support for public education. In addition we explore the implications for the design
of foreign aid. The results suggest that foreign aid policies should focus on promoting school attendance rather than increasing
school resources, as the later policy might be offset by a reduction in the recipient country’s fiscal effort, with little
impact on outcomes.
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We analyze the level and distribution of economic well-being in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s based on the
standard measure of money income and a measure in which income from wealth is calculated as the sum of lifetime annuity from
nonhome wealth and imputed rental-equivalent for owner-occupied homes. Over the 1982–2000 period, median well-being increases
faster when these adjustments are made than when standard money income is used. This adjustment also widens the income gap
between African-Americans and whites but increases the relative well-being of the elderly. Adding imputed rent and annuities
from household wealth to household income considerably increases measured inequality and the share of income from wealth in
inequality. However, both measures show about the same rise in inequality over the period. We also find an increasing share
of wage and salary income in our expanded definition of income among the richest 1% over the period but do not find that the
“working rich” have largely replaced rentiers at the top of the economic ladder.
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We investigate the extent to which the tax-and-transfer system of the United Kingdom equalizes opportunities for income attainment among citizens. Within the framework of Roemer’s theory of Equality of Opportunity, and using individual data from the British Household Panel Survey from 1991 to 2008, we calculate the tax rates necessary to equalize opportunities for different circumstances. We provide a ranking of these circumstances by the degree to which they influence income attainment. Although pre-fisc equality of opportunity increases over time, the tax rate necessary to equalize opportunities remains higher than the observed tax rate. Only under a relatively high labour supply elasticity the observed UK tax rate fares well in equalizing opportunities for income attainment. 相似文献
Self-employment, regardless of its quality, offers the advantage of keeping individuals employed, thereby contributing to a continuous work history and earnings over the lifetime. But in the individual life cycle, how important is self-employment, particularly given evidence that self-employment spells tend to be of short duration? Also, to what extent does self-employment contribute to race and gender differences in lifetime employment? We use an increment-decrement life table to analyze the role of self-employment in differentiating the working lifetimes of blacks and women from those of white men. White men's average lifetime years spent in self-employment exceed black men's by as many as six years, thus accounting for nearly the entire difference between whiteand black men's lifetime years employed. White women's self-employment episodes,while almost as numerous as white men's, are shorter and less connected towage-employment episodes. Black women's self-employment episodes are bothinfrequent and of short duration.
The article, written in 1973, examines what comparisons of income distributions can be made when Lorenz curves cross, employing
the concept of third-order stochastic dominance.
“More on the measurement of inequality” as reviewed by Prof. P. Lambert will appear in the Rediscovered Classics section,
along with the editorial. 相似文献