As population aging becomes more pronounced in the developing world, the uneven implementation of social safety nets raises important questions as to howwell traditional family-basedmechanisms insure elderly incomes when pension systems fail. Using a unique dataset from a recent household survey conducted in urban China, we find evidence that private transfers respond to low household income of...

H ow much reduction in inequality and poverty does latin america accomplish through taxes and transfers? How progressive1 are revenue-collection and social-spending patterns? an in-depth fiscal incidence analysis applied to argentina’s urban areas, where three-fourths of the population lives, as well as to Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and uruguay, finds the following: 1. the extent of income ...

Does More Money Make You Fat? The Effects of Quasi-Experimental Income Transfers on Adolescent and Young Adult Obesity This paper examines how exogenous income transfers during adolescence affect contemporaneous body mass index (BMI) measures and young adult obesity rates using evidence from the Great Smoky Mountains Study of Youth. The effects of extra income differ depending on the households...

The median voter hypothesis has been central to an extensive literature on consequences of income distribution. For example, it has been proposed that greater inequality is associated with lower growth, because of the greater redistribution that is sought by the median voter when income distribution is less equal. There have however been no proper tests of the median-voter hypothesis concerning...

Based on the economic theory of the family, this paper constructs a model of remittances where the migrant, besides sending money to his family, also invests in his home country. The investment is looked after by a family member in return for some monetary compensation. The model focuses on two different cases: state-contingent transfers (transfers are tied to investment outcomes) and fixed tra...

This paper introduces the concept of Pigou-Dalton transfers between populations of income receivers. Gini’s mean difference and Dagum’s Gini index between populations are axiomatically derived in order to gauge the impact of withinand between-group PigouDalton transfers on Dagum’s measure. We show its sensitiveness for any given transfer in the sense that inequality-reducing transfers are captu...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The relationship between population health and inequality in income distribution has attracted much attention during the last two decades. The purpose of this paper is to examine that relationship using Israeli time-series data, and considering three types of income: economic, pre-tax, and disposable. METHODS Israeli time series (1979-2000) on life expectancy of men ...

The social safety net responded in significant and favorable ways during the Great Recession. Aggregate per capita expenditures grew significantly, with particularly strong growth in the SNAP, EITC, UI, and Medicaid programs. Distributionally, the increase in transfers was widely shared across demographic groups, including families with and without children, single-parent and two-parent familie...

All countries look to economic growth to reduce low-income. This paper focuses on the 1990s and assesses the role played by changes in economic growth, employment earnings and government transfers in the patterns of low-income intensity in Canada during the 1990s. We find that low-income intensity was higher in most provinces during the 1990s than during the 1980s (comparing comparable position...