Globalization and wage inequality in South and East Asia, and Latin America: A gender approach

In this paper we analyse the reasons behind the evolution of the gender gap and wage inequality in South and East Asian and Latin American countries. Health human capital improvements, the exposure to free market openness and equal treatment enforcement laws seem to be the main exogenous variables affecting women s economic condition. During the second globalization era (in the years 1975-2000) different combinations of these variables in South East Asian and Latin American countries have had as a result the diminution of the gender gap. The main exception to this rule according to our data is China where economic reforms have been simultaneous to the increase of gender differences and inequality between men and women.This result has further normative consequences for the measure of economic inequality. Theimprovement of women s condition has as a result the diminution of the dispersion of wages.Therefore in most of the countries analysed the consequence of the diminution of the gender gapduring the second global era is the decrease of wage inequality both measured with Gini and Theil indexes.

Targeting fertility and female participation through the income tax

We evaluate the effect of a 2003 reform in the Spanish income tax on fertility and the employment of mothers with small children. The reform introduced a tax credit for working mothers with children under the age of three, while also increasing child deductions for all households with children. Theoretically, given the interplay of these two components, the expected effect of the reform is ambiguous on both outcomes. We find that the combined reforms significantly increased both fertility (by almost five percent) and the employment rate of mothers with children under three (by two percent). These effects were more pronounced among less-educated women. In addition, to disentangle the impact of the two reform components, we use an earlier reform that increased child deductions in 1999. We find that the child deductions affect mothers employment negatively, which implies that the 2003 tax credit would have increased employment even more (up to five percent) in the absence of the change in child deductions.

A-1a Supplemental Security Income Program, December 2007

A-1a - SUPPLEMENTAL SECURITY INCOME PROGRAM - December 2007

A-1a Supplemental Security Income Program, November 2007

A-1a - SUPPLEMENTAL SECURITY INCOME PROGRAM - November 2007

A sharp concentration inequality with applications

We present a new general concentration-of-measure inequality and illustrate its power by applications in random combinatorics. The results find direct applications in some problems of learning theory.

The survival of the welfare state

This paper provides an analytical characterization of Markov perfectequilibria in a politico-economic model with repeated voting, whereagents vote over distortionary income redistribution. The key featureof the theory is that the future constituency of redistributive policiesdepends positively on the current level of redistribution, since thisaffects both private investments and the future distribution of voters.Agents vote rationally and fullly anticipate the effects of their politicalchoice on both private incentives and future voting outcomes. The modelfeatures multiple equilibria. In "pro-welfare" equilibria, both welfarestate policies and their effects on distribution persist forever. In"anti-welfare equilibria", even a majority of beneficiaries ofredistributive policies vote strategically so as to induce the formationof a future majority that will vote for zero redistribution.

A-1A Supplemental Security Income Program, April 2008

A-1A - Supplemental Security Income Program, April 2008

A-1A Supplemental Security Income Program, March 2008

A-1A - Supplemental Security Income Program, March 2008

Why England? Demand, growth and inequality during the Industrial Revolution

Why was England first? And why Europe? We present a probabilistic model that builds on big-push models by Murphy, Shleifer and Vishny (1989), combined with hierarchical preferences. The interaction of exogenous demographic factors (in particular the English low-pressure variant of the European marriage pattern)and redistributive institutions such as the old Poor Law combined to make an Industrial Revolution more likely. Essentially, industrialization is the result of having a critical mass of consumers that is rich enough to afford (potentially) mass-produced goods. Our model is then calibrated to match the main characteristics of the English economy in 1750 and the observed transition until 1850.This allows us to address explicitly one of the key features of the British IndustrialRevolution unearthed by economic historians over the last three decades the slowness of productivity and output change. In our calibration, we find that the probability of Britain industrializing is 5 times larger than France s. Contrary to the recent argument by Pomeranz, China in the 18th century had essentially no chance to industrialize at all. This difference is decomposed into a demographic and a policy component, with the former being far more important than the latter.

Allowing for heterogeneity in the decomposition of measures of inequality in health

This paper shows how recently developed regression-based methods for the decomposition ofhealth inequality can be extended to incorporate heterogeneity in the responses of health to the explanatory variables. We illustrate our method with an application to the GHQ measure of psychological well-being taken from the British Household Panel Survey. The results suggest that there is an important degree of heterogeneity in the association of health to explanatory variables across birth cohorts and genders which, in turn, accounts for a substantial percentage of the inequality in observed health.

A-1A Supplemental Security Income Program, February 2008

A-1A - Supplemental Security Income Program, February 2008

A-1A Supplemental Security Income Program, January 2008

A-1A - Supplemental Security Income Program, January 2008

A-1A Supplemental Security Income Program, May 2008

A-1A - Supplemental Security Income Program, May 2008

Iowa Individual Income Tax Statistical Report 2006

Iowa Individual Income Tax Statistical Report 2006

A-1A Supplemental Security Income Program, June 2008

A-1A - Supplemental Security Income Program, June 2008