This paper examines the extent of consumption insurance against income risk by households in rural India. We estimate the effects of income changes on consumption after controlling for aggregate shocks through changes in village level consumption and household size. We also test whether there is a systematic wealth effect on the extent of consumption insurance against idiosyncratic income shock...

[Purpose] This paper attempted to determine the relationship between physical activity of men from Wrocław and their discretionary income. [Subjects and Methods] The subjects were 1,601 male survey respondents aged from 18 to 65 years old. The International Physical Activity Questionnaire was used for the assessment of physical activity. [Results] Among respondents, low intensity physical activ...

We analyze the taxation of top personal incomes in Germany on the basis of an integrated data file of individual tax returns and a general household survey for the years 1992 2002. The unique feature of this integrated data set is that it includes all taxpayers in the top percentile of the gross income distribution. We show that despite substantial tax base erosion and significant reductions of...

We analyze the taxation of top personal incomes in Germany on the basis of an integrated data file of individual tax returns and a general household survey for the years 1992 – 2002 which includes all taxpayers in the top percentile of the gross income distribution. We show that the distribution of the tax burden is highly concentrated, and that German income taxation has remained effectively p...

"A common hypothesis regarding the distribution of income is that it tends to become more unequal in the initial and middle stages of economic development, in part because of demographic changes. However, previous studies of the effect of demographic changes on income distribution are not based on the underlying micro determinants of the income components." In the present paper, "the micro de...

People with low incomes tend to make less healthy consumption choices than do high income people. In the case of food, agricultural economists have investigated whether this is due to the cost of a healthy diet. Studies of various aspects of the nutrition-income nexus have generally been inconclusive. We investigate a different possibility, motivated by the fact that low income individuals are ...

Financial adequacy in retirement largely depends on Social Security, pensions, and savings—commonly referred to as the “threelegged stool” of retirement income. Correspondingly, the elderly who receive all of their income from Social Security benefits are recognized as being economically vulnerable. Income of the Population 55 or Older, 2004 reports that 21 percent of beneficiary aged units 65 ...

We estimate the impacts of various types of government payments to U.S. agriculture on different components of farm household consumption. Using 2003 to 2005 data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS), we show that marginal rates of consumption differ by consumption category and income source, including different types of farm program payments. The results suggest that farm ho...

This paper examines the effect of income inequality on health for a group of particularly disadvantaged individuals: refugees. Our analysis draws on longitudinal hospitalization records coupled with a settlement policy where Swedish authorities assigned newly arrived refugees to their first area of residence. The policy was implemented in a way that provides a source of plausibly random variati...

This paper challenges the current belief that income inequality has a negative relationship with economic growth. It uses an improved data set on income inequality which not only reduces measurement error, but also allows estimation via a panel technique. Panel estimation makes it possible to control for time-invariant country-specific effects, therefore eliminating a potential source of omitte...