"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...

The issue addressed in this paper is the optimal taxation of incomes earned tn the home economy, and of incomes earned abroad, when people can migrate. As a preliminary, the optimal taxation of home incomes when there is migration and no taxation of foreign incomes, is discussed. Then in a more general setting, we deal with optimal taxation of different kinds of labour when another kind of labo...

This study investigates whether personal taxes are related to asset valuations. The effective tax rate of investment income fluctuated considerably since federal income taxes were introduced. The main result of the paper demonstrates that there is an economically and statistically significant relationship between asset valuations and personal tax rates. Stock valuations tend to be higher when t...

Optimality conditions and comparative static properties of the optimal Mirrleesian nonlinear income tax are obtained for a nite population and quasilinear-in-consumption preferences. Contrary to Weymark (1987) who considers quasilinear-in-leisure preferences, the linearity with respect to gross income, which is observed by the government and used as a tax base, is lost. A reduced-form optimal i...

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...