Article history: Received 28 May 2013 Received in revised form 17 February 2014 Accepted 19 February 2014 Available online 26 February 2014 The Urban Household Income and Expenditure Surveys, conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics, are extensively explored in income distribution studies. However, we find that a survey coverage expansion that includes migrant residents in the urban sampl...

Income Mobility of Individuals in China and the United States Though much has been written about annual income inequality in China, little research has been conducted on longer run measures of income inequality and on income mobility. This paper compares income mobility of urban individuals in China and the United States in the 1990s. The following questions are taken up. To what extent are mea...

This paper examines the steady states of an overlapping generations economy with a given distribution of household locations over a one-dimensional interval. Parents decide whether or not to educate their children. Educational decisions are affected by location: There are local complementarities in investment incentives stemming from aspirations formation, learning spillovers, or local public g...

Continental and Sub-Continental Income Inequality Income inequality can be measured at different levels of aggregation such as global, continental, international and national levels. Here we consider income inequality at regions defined as equivalent of continental and sub-continental levels. We investigate the economic disparity between regions of the world and among countries within each cont...

This paper analyzes the private provision of public goods where consumers interact within a fixed network structure and may benefit only from their direct neighbors’ provisions. We present a proof for existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium with general best-reply functions. Our uniqueness result simultaneously extends similar results in Bergstrom, Blume, and Varian (1986) on the private...

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...

This paper examines the eff ect of neighborhood diversity on the nativity gap in homevalue appreciation in Australia. Specifi cally, immigrant homeowners experienced a 41.7 percent increase in median home values between 2001 and 2006, while the median value of housing owned by the native-born increased by 59.4 percent over the same period. We use a semi-parametric decomposition approach to asse...

We develop a new quantile-based framework to study the nonlinear relationship between shocks to household earnings and consumption over the life cycle. Log-earnings are the sum of a general Markovian persistent component and a transitory innovation. Consumption is modeled as an age-dependent nonlinear function of assets and the two earnings components. We establish the nonparametric identificat...

Inequality indices (i) evaluate the divergence between the income distribution and the hypothetical situation where all individuals have the mean income and (ii) are unambiguously reduced by a Pigou-Dalton progressive transfer. This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate the divergence between any two income distributions, where the second one can be a reference distribution for the first. I...

Direct Evidence on Income Comparisons and their Welfare Effects This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect on subjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types of benchmarks. Dynamic comparisons outweigh static ones. Internal benchmarks are more important than external reference groups. Local comparisons (to parents,...