What are the impacts on household incomes of the major economic downturn that occurred in almost all OECD countries starting in late 2007? This paper is a condensed version of a public lecture given at the University of Melbourne in honour of R. I. Downing. It draws on a study of 21 rich countries using data from national accounts, household surveys, and other sources. The headline findings are...

Always Poor or Never Poor and Nothing in Between? Duration of Child Poverty in Germany This paper analyses the duration of child poverty in Germany. In our sample, we observe the entire income history from the individuals' birth to their coming of age at age 18. Therefore we are able to analyze dynamics in and out of poverty for the entire population of children, whether they become poor at lea...

We analyze the one loop corrections to hadronic Z decays in an R–parity violating extension to the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). Performing a global fit to all the hadronic observables at the Z–peak, we obtain stringent constraints on the R–violating coupling constants λ and λ. As a result of the strong constraints from the b asymmetry parameters Ab and AFB(b), we find that the ...

This paper investigates the impact of economic growth and more specifically robust economic growth along with other macroeconomic determinants on poverty levels using both the U.S. official measure of poverty and an estimated time series of Sen indices of poverty. The results reveal that the period of robust economic expansion that the U.S. economy experienced during the 1990s did not have a si...

Aphorisms that “rising tides raise all boats” or that material advances of the rich eventually “trickle down” to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income/wellbeing paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications for the empirical analysis of wellbeing of conventional assumptions regarding such processes which are emplo...

Intergenerational Earnings Mobility among the Children of Canadian Immigrants We analyze the intergenerational income mobility of Canadians born to immigrants using the 2001 Census. A detailed portrait of the Canadian population is offered as are estimates of the degree of generational mobility among the children of immigrants from 70 countries. The degree of persistence as estimated in regress...

This paper represents a first attempt to gather the issues of growth “pro-poorness” andmultidimensional poverty assessments. More precisely, we suggest the use of sequential dominance procedures (Bourguignon, 1989, Atkinson, 1992, Jenkins and Lambert, 1993) to test the “pro-poorness” of observed growth spells when poverty is measured on the basis of income and some other discrete well-being att...

This paper compares the experience of poverty reduction in China and India. It finds that more than economic growth per se, what has mattered crucially is the nature of the growth: whether it is associated with growing inequalities that do not allow the benefits of growth to reach the poor; whether the structural change involved in the growth process generates sufficient opportunities for produ...

Measuring Richness and Poverty: A Micro Data Application to Europe and Germany In this paper, we define a new class of richness measures. In contrast to the often used headcount, these new measures are sensitive to changes in rich persons’ income and therefore allow for a more sophisticated analysis of richness. We demonstrate the application of these new measures to analyze the development of ...

Data Issues and Databases Used in Analysis of Growth, Poverty and Economic Inequality This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency, variable definiti...