Frontiers of mobility: Was Australia 1870–2017 a more socially mobile society than England?

There is longstanding pride among Australians that by throwing off the social class demarcations that defined their ossified colonial parent society, England, they created an open, socially mobile society. The paper tests this belief by estimating long run social mobility rates in Australia 1870–2017, using the status of rare surnames. The status information includes occupations from electoral rolls 1903–1980, and records of degrees awarded by Melbourne and Sydney universities 1852–2017. Status persistence was strong throughout, with an intergenerational correlation of occupational or educational status of 0.7–0.8, and no change over time. Mobility rates were also just as low within UK immigrants and their descendants, so ethnic group effects explain none of the immobility. The less pronounced class divisions of Australia compared to England did not enhance social mobility. A possible sign of enhanced Australian social mobility – the fact that surnames associated with convicts already had a modest elite status by 1870 – seems to derive from convicts transported to Australia from England being positively selected in terms of human capital.     

Multi-generational educational mobility in China in the twentieth century

Two essential strategies to understand the mechanisms of intergenerational mobility are to compare mobility across countries and across time. However, for multi-generational mobility, estimates for developing countries are mostly missing, and trend studies are rare. This paper uses education to measure social status and provides nationally representative estimates of social mobility over three generations in China that are suitable for international comparison. Results show that grandparents’ education positively correlates with children’s education, controlling for the parents’ education. This grandparent effect is comparable to what is found in Western countries, despite differences in cultures and institutions. During the sample period, the correlation between grandparent and child education is relatively stable. When exploring mechanisms, we find that the observed grandparent effect is primarily due to omitted information from the parents’ generation, not direct interactions between grandparents and children.     

Who bears the burden of employer compliance with social security contributions? Evidence from Chinese firm level data

This article utilizes firm level audited data from Shanghai in 2002 and 2003 to examine the extent to which employers shift the burden of compliance with social security obligations back to employees in the form of lower wages. Results from a fixed effects panel model using data on a subset of the firms audited in both years found that 18.9% of the compliance cost was shifted back to employees in the form of lower wages. Separate two-stage least squares estimates with controls for firm size, ownership and industry type for 2002 and 2003 found that the incidence of social insurance contributions on employees increased across the two years. In 2002 the incidence of social insurance contributions on employees was 9.1% and in 2003 this increased to 33.8%. An explanation for the increase in the incidence on employees over the two years is that employer compliance improved in 2003 compared with 2002.     

漫谈古人的座次规则

礼仪渗入到了古人社会生活的方方面面。不同场合、不同地位的人，他们的座次顺序不同，一般来说，古人在堂上以坐北向南为最尊，所以总是说君王面南背北。但是如果在堂上举行其它礼仪活动，就不是这样了。在室中以坐西向东为最尊，因为这个位置接近室内最尊的方向西南，也就是接近“奥”。一张席子如果同时坐了多个人，他们的坐法也有讲究。对这一点的深入了解，有助于我们更好地了解古代文献，更深入地了解古人的生活。     

Worth,age, and social status in early modern England1

This article introduces a new source for assessing the distribution of wealth in early modern England derived from witness depositions taken by the church courts. It discusses the accuracy of statements of ‘worth’ provided by thousands of witnesses between the mid‐sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries, and uses the monetary estimates of worth in goods that the majority of deponents supplied to assess the changing distribution of personal wealth. We argue that this data supports recent claims that the pre‐industrial English economy experienced significant levels of economic growth, while showing that its benefits were increasingly unevenly distributed between different social groups. In particular, the century after 1550 witnessed spectacular increases in yeoman worth that outstripped inflation by a factor of 10. The relative wealth of yeomen was also underpinned by its more secure distribution over the life cycle which further compounded the differences between them and other social groups.     

Estimating the Effects of Earnings Uncertainty on Families' Saving and Insurance Decisions

This paper investigates whether families save partially to self-insure against uncertain future earnings and estimates the extent to which pooled insurance substitutes for saving as a precaution against earnings risk. An econometric model is estimated using unique household survey data from the nineteenth century to examine families' joint saving and insurance decisions. The historical microdata are of interest because they predate widespread social insurance programs, which may stunt self-insurance through private saving among contemporary families. The econometric results imply that two independent measures of idiosyncratic earnings risk matter for families' saving decisions. Additionally, families whose primary wage earners belong to labor unions significantly save less frequently than others, all else being equal, but this tendency is not apparent among members of private benevolent societies.     

Saving,investment, and capital mobility among OECD countries

Historically investigations of the international mobility of capital have studied rates of return on similar assets denominated in different currencies. Recently, however, efforts directed at ascertaining the degree of international capital mobility have examined the relationship between domestic saving and investment rates. The first approach assesses the mobility of groups of financial assets which represent the existing capital stock while the latter actually scrutinizes the mobility of new physical capital.This paper employs the second approach in a times series study of capital mobility among OECD countries. Implementation of four different tests of the saving-investment relationship suggest that physical capital is more mobile than previous studies have indicated.     

农村居民多维收入流动、税费负担及政策效应——基于面板数据PSM-DID方法的研究

收入流动性是从动态视角衡量居民收入分配公平与否的重要指标,其变动程度受到税收等因素的影响。文章基于2001年至2014年季度和年度面板数据,依据多维收入流动指标,测算出了地区之间农村居民绝对和相对收入流动程度,并利用双重差分倾向得分匹配法（PSM-DID）和工具变量估计法研究了农村税费改革及其他经济社会因素对农村居民收入流动性的影响。研究发现：（1）农村税费改革的政策效应非常显著,实施农业税费减免政策的地区,其农民的绝对收入流动性显著高于未改革地区;（2）税费负担对绝对收入流动性的影响呈现出"倒U型"特征,即当税费负担率为0.167%时,绝对收入流动性达到最大值,若进一步增加税费负担,收入流动性则呈现下降趋势;（3）税费支出变动对相对收入流动性的影响也通过了5%的显著性检验;（4）农村劳动力文化结构、工资收入比重等家庭特征因素对收入流动性的影响具有较大的地区异质性。有鉴于此,在进一步完善税费征收项目监管的同时,依据家庭及地区特征实施差异化的支农惠农政策,切实减轻农民负担,增强农村居民收入流动,实现地区间收入分配均衡。     

The mobility of top earnings,income, and wealth in China: Facts from the 2011–2017 China household finance survey

We document rich facts of the intra-generational mobility of households in the top fractiles of earnings, income, and wealth distributions in China using the panel data of the 2011–2017 China Household Finance Survey. We find high mobility co-exists with high inequalities within various top fractile groups. In specific, persistence rates of the top 1% group implied an inverted-U pattern for top earnings mobility, a declined trend of top income mobility, and an improved trend for top wealth mobility during the study period. Although the overall trends of mobility for top earnings, income, and wealth showed diverse patterns, they are still considered high from global comparisons. Besides, the top 1% households generate significantly more income from business and allocate a higher fraction of their assets to private equity.     

The impact of education on income inequality and intergenerational mobility

This paper analyses the effects of innate ability, compulsory education (grades 1–9), and non-compulsory education (grades 10–12 and higher education) on inequality and intergenerational mobility of income, by constructing a four-period overlapping-generation model. We find that innate ability and family investment in early education play important roles in explaining income inequality and intergenerational income mobility. Though children from the wealthiest families are only 1.36 times ‘smarter’ that those from the poorest, the gap in human capital expands to 2.35 at the end of compulsory education and to 2.89 at the end of non-compulsory education. One important reason for the increase is that poor families invest relatively less in children's early education than do wealthy families; therefore, their children attend lower-quality schools, which results in them being much less likely to participate in higher education. By simulating policy experiments for different types of government education expenditure, we find that direct subsidies to poor parents are the most efficient and effective policy for mitigating poor families' budget constraints with regard to early-education investment in their children.     

Converging Mainlander and Native Taiwanese, 1949–2012

This paper uses a surname‐based methodology to estimate the intergenerational correlation between native Taiwanese and mainlanders during 1949–2012. It finds that mainlanders, who initially had an advantage in higher education and high profile occupations, regressed towards population average at a relatively constant rate, which is much higher than suggested by previous studies. This paper argues that the difference either reflects a group‐level inequality because of the impacts of kinships and extended families, or it measures the intergenerational correlation of an unobservable variable, the true underlying social status, which is imperfectly correlated with income, education, or occupation at the individual level.     

Wage Returns to Schooling in Nigeria

Abstract: In the last two decades, primary and secondary school enrollment rates have declined in Nigeria while enrollment rates in post‐secondary school have increased. This paper estimates from the General Household Survey for Nigeria the private returns to schooling associated with levels of educational attainment for wage and self‐employed workers. The estimates for both men and women are small at primary and secondary levels, 2–4 percent, but are substantial at post‐secondary education level, 10–15 percent. These schooling return estimates may account for the recent trends in enrollments. Thus, increasing public investment to encourage increased attendance in basic education is not justifiable on grounds of private efficiency, unless investments to increase school quality have higher private returns. With high private returns to post‐secondary schooling, students at this level should pay tuition, to recoup more of the public costs of schooling, which may be redistributed to poor families through scholarships.     

Wage-Tenure Profiles and Mobility

The Dutch labour market is characterized by low job mobility and high average duration of unemployment for older jobseekers. This study investigates the role of wage-tenure profiles in explaining patterns of job mobility. Based on a large administrative database, the estimates show that wage-tenure profiles in the Netherlands are relatively steep. Furthermore, industries with high returns to tenure appear to have a high share of older workers, as well as high average job tenure. This implies that steep wage-tenure profiles are related to low levels of mobility.     

Hurricane Katrina as an Experiment in Housing Mobility and Neighborhood Effects: Were the Relocated Poor Black Evacuees Better-Off?

Hurricane Katrina induced hundreds of thousands of New Orleans citizens to evacuate and relocate to different neighborhoods. Some of these evacuees moved to neighborhoods with poverty rates lower than the one they left in New Orleans. With survey data on a small sample of black Katrina evacuees who registered for absentee voter ballots, this paper explores whether or not there were improvements in the welfare of black evacuees—neighborhood effects—as a result of moving to neighborhoods with a lower poverty rate. With data from a small sample of relocated Katrina evacuees, we provide matching estimates of the short-run treatment effect of different types of changes in neighborhood poverty on five different measures of individual welfare. Treatment parameter estimates reveal—conditional upon the change in origin to destination neighborhood poverty rate—positive neighborhood effects mostly for black evacuees who did not move from high poverty to low poverty neighborhoods, but could have. Our results suggest that at least in the short-run, antipoverty policies based on housing mobility and changing the poverty characteristics of neighborhoods are not necessarily effective in improving the welfare of poor black households.     

Alcohol Availability and Crime: Evidence from Census Tract Data

Using census tract data from the city of Detroit and a reduced-form crime equation, this article finds that alcohol availability is positively and significantly related to total, property, and violent crime rates and homicides. The elasticity of crime rates with respect to alcohol availability calculated in this study are 0.92, 0.82, 0.87, and 0.12 for total crime, violent crime, property crime, and homicide, respectively. These elasticities do not change qualitatively across estimation methods for the various measures of crime rates. I find that ordinary least squares estimates impart a downward bias to the effects alcohol availability has on crime rates. Failure to account for the endogeneity of alcohol outlets will therefore result in an underestimate of crime elasticities with respect to alcohol availability. The estimates imply that reducing alcohol availability may decrease crime rates and improve social welfare.     

省域社会资本对区域发展的贡献分析

以中国大陆31个省市区为单位的截面数据,以信任度、社会团体密度和献血率等指标来衡量各自社会资本,并通过社会资本贡献模型,分析社会资本对区域经济发展、社会发展和环境方面的贡献情况。研究结果显示社会资本存量具有明显的地理差异性和分布的不平衡性。区域间社会资本对区域发展的贡献存在较大的差别,并且在同一区域中社会资本对区域发展的三个方面的贡献也存在差异。     

Settlement location shapes the integration of forced migrants: Evidence from post-war Germany

Following one of the largest displacements in human history, almost eight million forced migrants arrived in West Germany after WWII. We study empirically how the settlement location of migrants affected their economic, social and political integration in West Germany. We first document large differences in integration outcomes across West German counties. We then show that high inflows of migrants and a large agrarian base hampered integration. Religious differences between migrants and natives had no effect on economic integration. Yet, they decreased intermarriage rates and strengthened anti-migrant parties. Based on our estimates, we simulate the regional distribution of migrants that maximizes their labor force participation. Intra-German migration in the 1950s brought the actual distribution closer to its optimum.     

Is the eldest son different? The residential choice of siblings in Japan

In this paper, we analyze the determinants of the living arrangements (coresidence behavior) of elderly parents and their children (whether elderly parents live with their children, and if so, with which child) in Japan using micro-data from a household survey. Our results provide support for all four explanations of coresidence behavior but especially for the life cycle and dynasty models (both of which assume selfishly motivated parents) and social norms and traditions: the fact that parents who were self-employed before retirement are more likely to live with their children, the fact that parents are less likely to live with sons who adopt their wife's surname, and the fact that parents are more likely to live with daughters whose husbands adopt their surname constitute evidence in favor of the dynasty model. The fact that parents who were (relatively wealthy) executives before retirement and parents who are homeowners are more likely to live with their children and the fact that parents are more likely to live with less educated children constitute evidence in favor of the selfish life cycle model (or the altruism model). And the fact that parental attitudes toward their children affect their coresidence behavior, the fact that parents are more likely to live with their eldest child if their eldest child is a son, and the fact that parents are most likely to live with their eldest son even if he is not the eldest child constitute evidence in favor of social norms and traditions.     

Chinese per Capita Income Distribution, 1992–2007: A Regional Perspective

This paper explores the regional per capita income distribution in China between 1992 and 2007. The spatial dependence present in the raw data is removed using a filtering technique. A non‐parametric approach is applied to the filtered data to show that regional inequalities have been roughly stable, the distribution shape has changed very little and mobility within the distribution has been relatively low. Finally, the paper investigates the impact of various economic and social factors on the evolution of regional income distribution. Primary sector employment, physical capital, trade openness and foreign direct investment are all found to be key determinants of regional income distribution.