The study reported here sought to assess the degree to which the prevalences of five risk factors for noncommunicable diseases--hypertension, smoking, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, and excessive alcohol consumption--varied individually and in combination for urban Brazilians with differing socioeconomic status in terms of educational achievement, income, and social class. For this purpose, 1986...

BACKGROUND Several epidemiological studies have found that lung cancer is inversely related to socioeconomic status (SES) and suggest it as a possible risk factor for lung cancer. This study examines SES and lung cancer risk in Canada. METHODS Mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up were used to obtain data on 3280 newly diagnosed, histologically confirmed lung cancer cases and 5073 po...

Social class reflects more than the material conditions of people’s lives. Objective resources (e.g., income) shape cultural practices and behaviors that signal social class. These signals create cultural identities among upperand lower-class individuals— identities that are rooted in subjective perceptions of social-class rank vis-à-vis others. Empirical studies find that perceptions of social...

AIM The aim of this study is to determine the factors responsible for differences in the prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) in subjects of different social class in an urban South Indian population. MATERIALS AND METHODS Analyses were based on the cross-sectional data from the Chennai Urban Rural Epidemiology Study of 1989 individuals, aged ≥20 years. Entered in the analyses were informatio...

BACKGROUND To investigate the impact of the gap between subjective and objective social status on health-related quality of life. METHODS We analyzed data from 12,350 participants aged ≥ 18 years in the Korean Health Panel Survey. Health-related quality of life was measured by EuroQol-Visual analogue scale. Objective (income and education) and subjective social class (measured by MacArthur sc...

Income inequality in the USA has increased over the past four decades. Socioeconomic gaps in survival have also increased. Life expectancy has risen among middle-income and high-income Americans whereas it has stagnated among poor Americans and even declined in some demographic groups. Although the increase in income inequality since 1980 has been driven largely by soaring top incomes, the wide...

The paper reviews statistical models for money, wealth, and income distributions developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. By analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy in physics, it is shown that the probability distribution of money is exponential for certain classes of models with interacting economic agents. Alternative scenarios are also reviewed. Data an...

This Colloquium reviews statistical models for money, wealth, and income distributions developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. By analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy in physics, it is shown that the probability distribution of money is exponential for certain classes of models with interacting economic agents. Alternative scenarios are also reviewed. D...

We estimate the elasticity of charitable giving with respect to persistent and transitory price and income changes using a 1979–2006 panel of tax returns. Our estimation procedure allows for anticipation of and gradual adjustment to tax changes, controls for various potential sources of omitted variable bias via fi xed effects and income-class specifi c year dummies, and allows for a fl exible ...

This paper argues that widening income inequality contributes to the propensity to evade by both reducing the probability of detection and increasing compliance opportunity costs. Lower detection probability occurs as rising inequality gradually alters the composition of income from being employment-based (i.e., matchable) to investment-based (i.e., non-matchable). Greater economic polarization...