Food UTILIZATION Utilization is commonly understood as the way the body makes the most of various nutrients in the food. Sufficient energy and nutrient intake by individuals is the result of good care and feeding practices, food preparation, diversity of the diet and intra-household distribution of food. Combined with good biological utilization of food consumed, this determines the nutritional...

Earlier studies on income inequality and crime have typically used total income or total earnings. However, it is quite likely that it is changes in permanent rather than in transitory income that affects crime rates. The purpose of this paper is therefore to disentangle the two effects by, first, estimating region-specific inequality in permanent and transitory income and, second, estimating c...

Using a large linked employer-employee data set, this paper studies the extent to which employers insure workers against transitory and permanent firm-level shocks. Particular emphasis is given to the question of whether the amount of wage insurance depends on the nature of industrial relations. Adopting the identification strategy proposed by Guiso et al. (2005), it is shown that wage insuranc...

Economists and political scientists have argued that differences in the risk of civil conflict across countries and over time may partly reflect differences in the opportunity cost of participating in civil conflicts. One way to test for the opportunity-cost channel is to examine civil conflict risk following transitory income shocks. In this paper I propose two instrumentalvariables approaches...

The interaction of liqu id ity constraints and a precautionary savings motive in an economy with consumer heterogeneity in the form of non-stationary, un insurab le , idiosyncratic earnings pro cesses re solves the risk free rate puzzle. The general equ ilibrium bu er stock saving model generates interest rates that match empirical regularities when idiosyncratic sho cks contain both persistent...

Trends in the Transitory Variance of Male Earnings in the U.S., 1970-2004 We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using both an error components model as well as simpler but only approximate methods, we find that the transitory variance started to increase in the early 1970s, continued to ...

Policy, Institutional Factors and Earnings Mobility This paper uses ECHP and OECD data for 14 EU countries to explore the role of labour market factors in explaining cross-national differences in the dynamic structure of earnings: in permanent inequality, transitory inequality and earnings mobility. Based on ECHP, minimum distance estimator is used to decompose earnings inequality into the perm...

The intertemporal current account approach predicts that the current account of a small open economy is independent of global shocks, and that responses of the current account to countryspecific shocks depend on the persistence of the shocks. The author shows that these predictions impose cross-equation restrictions (CERS) on a structural vector autoregression (SVAR). To test the CERs, the auth...

We examine the role of high-frequency traders (HFT) in price discovery. Overall HFT play a positive role in price efficiency by trading in the direction of permanent price changes and in the opposite direction of transitory pricing errors on average days and the highest volatility days. This is done through their marketable orders. In contrast, HFT passive non-marketable orders are adversely se...

Earnings Instability and Earnings Inequality in Urban China: 1989–2006 This paper investigates the evolution of earnings inequality in urban China from 1989 to 2006. After decomposing the variance of log of earnings into transitory and permanent two parts, we find that both components are important contributors to the total variance of earnings. We also find that the share of the transitory par...