It is well-established that the effects of poverty are devastating for children in school. More generally, scholars have documented that low "socio-economic status" (SES), whether measured by family income, parent education, or parent occupation, is usually the most powerful predictor of achievement and test score performance, sometimes swamping all other factors (White, 1982). This advantage t...

This paper argues that health transfers from an individual at a lower rank in the health distribution to a person at a higher rank may decrease the concentration index if the former has a slightly higher income. The concentration index, being mainly focused on the socio-economic dimension of health inequality, can produce such counter-intuitive results that overlook the pure health inequality a...

Complementing prior research on income and educational mobility, we examine the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities. We find that individuals’ cognitive skills are positively related to their parents’ abilities, despite controlling for educational attainment and family background. Differentiating between mothers’ and fathers’ IQ transmission, we find different effects on the c...

Eli Heckscher (1919) and Bertil Ohlin (1933) laid the groundwork for substantial developments in the theory of international trade by focusing on the relationships between the composition of countries’ factor endowments and commodity trade patterns as well as the consequences of free trade for the functional distribution of income within countries. From the outset general equilibrium forms of a...

The Stern Review reported a social cost of carbon of over $300/tC, calling for ambitious climate policy. We here conduct a systematic sensitivity analysis of this result on two crucial parameters: the rate of pure time preference, and the rate of risk aversion. We show that the social cost of carbon lies anywhere in between 0 and $120 000/tC. However, if we restrict these two parameters to matc...

This paper presents a two-country dynamic perfect foresight Ricardian model with wealth effects to study the relationship between government spending financed by alternative taxation, the terms of trade and welfare. An increase in domestic government spending financed by a distortionary capital income tax leads the real exchange rate initially to appreciate (a pure demand effect). But along the...

This paper explores the rationale for unemployment beneÞts as a complement to optimal non-linear income taxation. High-skilled workers and low-skilled workers face different exogenous risks of being unemployed. As long as the low-skilled workers face a higher unemployment risk, we Þnd that there is a case for over-insuring the lowskilled, hence the unemployment beneÞts of the low-skilled should...

We examine pure no-load funds over a 5-year period. For equity funds, trading activity is negatively related to returns. Expense ratios are not significantly related to returns. Potential capital gains exposure and tax cost ratio are positively related to return. For fixed income funds, trading activity is positively related to return. Expense ratios and tax cost ratios are negatively related t...

Using detailed data on gifts, loans, and asset sales, this paper investigates how rural Filipino households deal with income and expenditure shocks. We find that shocks have a strong effect on gifts and informal loans, but little effect on sales of livestock and grain. Mutual insurance does not appear to take place at the village level; rather, households receive help primarily through networks...

When individuals with the same preferences but different gross wages and non-labor incomes allocate time to leisure and labor and contribute to a pure public good, the order of contributors' utilities is a perfect inversion of the order of their gross wages. The same applies to contributors' net and gross wages when contributions are financed by income from labor. There are consequences regardi...