Contrary to the popular view that the U.S. welfare system has been in a contractionary phase after the expansions of the welfare state in the 1960s, welfare spending resumed steady growth after a pause in the 1970s. However, although aggregate spending is higher than ever, there have been redistributions away from non-elderly and nondisabled families to families with older adults and to familie...

This article develops a typology of family change over the first five years of children's lives using data from the Millennium Cohort Study. It examines the changes over time of parental living arrangements and describes a range of social, economic and well-being indicators. It shows that nearly three quarters of this sample of young children have not experienced changes in family structures. T...

This paper is a survey of recent progress in the theory of ruin for risk processes that earn investment return on invested assets.

2. Inflation tends to injure low-income groups somewhat more than the upper income or even the middle income groups. Theoretically this should not necessarily be so, but it works that way because lower income groups cannot, or do not know how to, protect themselves as do people at higher income levels. For example, in several public opinion polls, people have been asked how they think they can ...

April 2009 OVERVIEW The number of U.S. children living in poverty increased in 2007—continuing an upward trend dating back to 2000: In 2007, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, up from 11.6 million children in 2000. The percentage of children living in families with incomes below the poverty line has increased from 16.2 percent in 2000 to 18.0 percent in 2007. Thus, a large number of ...

Housing affordability is the relationship between households’ income and housing expenditure. The public are very concerned about the high price of residential housing in Beijing, which is considered go beyond the income of average citizens. In order to fully understand the China’s real estate market, the paper first analyses the land policy, housing reform and housing finance, etc. Then this p...

INTRODUCTION In addition to economic inequalities, there has been growing concern over socioeconomic inequalities in health across income levels and/or regions. This study measures income-related health inequalities within and between regions and assesses the possibility of convergence of socioeconomic inequalities in health as regional incomes converge. METHODS We considered a total of 45,23...

Internation comparisons of average national incomes omit important information about leisure, home production, health, etc. They are also bedevilled by index number problems. This paper suggests ways of combining working hours and life-expectancy with income comparisons, and shows that the fixed-price indexes of real income, such as those in the Penn World Table, substantially understate the in...

Trade's effect on the living standards of the poor is generally found to be the dominant channel through which trade influences child time allocation and schooling. Trade can influence the living standards of the poor by changing consumption prices and through altering labor and family asset income. It is this later channel, changes in labor and asset incomes, that researchers have highlighted ...

Using a hedonic wage-amenity model, this paper examines the valuation of medical inputs into the production of health. The data used in this study include the incomes, demographics and measures of human capital for households in eastern North Carolina with county level medical input supply. These data allow an estimate of the marginal value of medical care inputs such as the physician to popula...