Editors The MSU International Development Paper series is designed to further the comparative analysis of international development activities in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Near East. The papers report research findings on historical, as well as contemporary, international development problems. The series includes papers on a wide range of topics, such as alternative rural development...

This paper considers the effects of changes in the income distribution in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. We introduce a new methodology to compare the behavior of agents that occupy the same rank in the two different income distributions but typically have different levels of incomes, and an...

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...

Doctors are involved in voluntary service more commonly than both the community and our professional colleagues realise. Traditionally, doctors are seen as busy healers who never stop looking after the sick and/or making a fortune from their daily activities. On the other hand, many in society think doctors are typically earning such high incomes that they can readily afford to volunteer their ...

In a sample of Tanzanian formal sector workers the vast majority have a desire for working longer hours in their main job, and supplement earnings through participation in informal production. Determinants of participation in informal production are examined through estimation of structural-form Logit models. A new way around the problem of measuring incomes from informal production is suggeste...

We analyze a macroeconomic model of monopolistic competition in which consumers earn unequal incomes. When preferences are non-homothetic, the distribution of income affects equilibrium mark-ups and equilibrium product diversity. Inequality, Market Power, and Product Diversity Reto Foellmi, University of Zurich Josef Zweimüller, University of Zurich, CESifo, IZA, and CEPR∗†

OBJECTIVE This paper aims to contrast the demographic correlates of leisure and transportation walking. METHODS Using data from the 2005 National Health Interview Survey (n=31,482), this paper reports on the prevalence of transportation walking and leisure walking for U.S. adults and examines the variation in prevalence across different socio-demographic groups. The prevalence of transportati...

Nonmetropolitan America contains almost 25 percent of the nation's population and 33 percent of its labor force. Rural residents are more likely to experience subemployment or poverty than their urban counterparts', and nonmetropolitan areas have lower wage rates and family income than urban areas. During the 1970s, rural areas benefited from a shift of manufacturing jobs from the metropolitan ...

In this paper I study the long-term effects of inter-municipal moving during childhood on income using Swedish register data. Due to the richness of the data I am able to control for important sources of selection into moving, such as parent separation, parents’ unemployment, education, long run income, and immigration background. I find that children’s long run incomes are significantly negati...