esults from the most recent California Health Interview Survey (CHIS 2003) indicate that food insecurity has increased significantly among low-income California adults since 2001. In 2003, more than 2.9 million adults in low-income households – those with incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty level (FPL) – experienced periods during the year when they could not afford to put food on the...

A couple decades ago fiscal federalism used to be a topic of marginal importance in most countries and in the economic literature. The world was broadly divided in federal states and unitary states and there were hardly any countries that planned to move from one to the other of these categories. In recent years, however, perhaps as a result of globalization and deepening democratization, combi...

Population growth and economic change are tightly bound together. The very high rates of population growth in the poor countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America complicate the resolution of basic economic problems and make it more difficult to assure an adequate rate of growth of income per capita. Simultaneously, the relative stagnation of per capita incomes, especially in the rural areas o...

Many studies have argued that relative income predicts individual well-being. More recently, it has been suggested that the relative rank of an individual’s income, rather than how that income compares to a mean or reference income, is important. Here the relative rank hypothesis is examined along with the additional hypothesis that individuals compare their incomes predominantly with those of ...

—This paper explores new roles that traditionally rural kinship networks organized around the marriage institution might play in improving labor market outcomes in urban Africa. Using new data from Kisumu, Kenya, and controlling for selection into marriage, we find that marriage significantly increases employment levels and incomes in our sample of migrants. At the same time, marriage increases...

In the 1990s, conventional measures of productivity growth, or the growth in output per worker, have indicated a dramatic rise. If these measures are correct, the economic benefits are clear. In the short run, sustained, faster productivity growth would enable the economy to expand more rapidly without intensifying inflationary pressures. In the long run, sustained, faster productivity growth w...

We present a simple explanation for the occurrence of power-law tails in statistical distributions by showing that if stochastic processes with exponential growth in expectation are killed (or observed) randomly, the distribution of the killed or observed state exhibits power-law behavior in one or both tails. This simple mechanism can explain power-law tails in the distributions of the sizes o...

 For all age groups above 65, Social Security remains the primary source of income. In 2009, households ages 65–74 and households with members age 85 or above received 54 percent and 66 percent of their total household incomes, respectively, from Social Security benefits.  The importance of Social Security income increases with age. For households that had members ages 65– 69 in 2001, the sha...

The relationship between health and income is well established, but the link between subjective financial well-being and self-reported health has been relatively ignored. This study investigates the relationship between income, subjective financial well-being and health in mid-life and later life in Britain. Analysis of the General Household Survey for 2006 examined these relationships at ages ...

"This paper investigates the effect of parental benefits on the timing and spacing of births and on employment dynamics of Swedish women. Using microdata on wages and incomes, I estimate a reduced-form multistate duration model of the bivariate life-cycle fertility and employment process. The paper provides an example of the application of empirical procedures to develop and evaluate multistat...