CAN HOUSEHOLDS AND WELFARE STATES MITIGATE RISING EARNINGS INSTABILITY?

We compare the evolution of earnings instability in Germany and the United Kingdom, two countries which stand for different types of welfare states. Deploying data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we estimate permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984–2009 and 1991–2006, respectively. Studies in this literature generally use individual labor earnings. To uncover the role of welfare state and households in smoothening earnings shocks, we compute different income concepts ranging from gross earnings to net equivalent household income. We find evidence that the overall inequality of earnings in Germany and the United Kingdom has been rising throughout the period due to both higher permanent earnings inequality and higher earnings volatility. However, taking institutions of the welfare state and risk‐sharing households into account, we find that the volatility of net household income has remained fairly stable. Furthermore, redistribution and risk insurance provided by the welfare state is more pronounced in Germany than in the United Kingdom.     

The OECD Better Life Initiative: How's Life? and the Measurement of Well‐Being

This paper presents the framework used by the OECD for defining and measuring well‐being, developed as part of the OECD Better Life Initiative launched in 2011. This framework measures well‐being by considering 11 dimensions covering both current material conditions and quality of life, while also recognizing the importance of taking account the sustainability of well‐being in the future. This framework has been populated with indicators for each dimension, whose selection has relied on international standards on measurement and was made in consultation with experts and National Statistical Offices of OECD countries. The paper also discusses the pros and cons of various approaches for presenting and disseminating information on multidimensional well‐being to different audiences—including the OECD Better Life Index, an interactive web tool. The paper concludes by illustrating the progress made in developing measures of well‐being and outlines the statistical agenda ahead to improve existing indicators and develop new ones.     

Four Decades of the Economics of Happiness: Where Next?

There has been explosive growth in the analysis of subjective well‐being in Economics over the past 40 years. This article reviews some of this growth, and suggests a number of domains in which future research may proceed.     

Filtral preorders and opportunity inequality

We compare profiles of opportunity sets by means of set-inclusion filtral preorders (SIFPs). Some significant results of the classic theory of income inequality are reproduced in the SIFP-framework.     

Alternative theories of wage dispersion

We analyze labor market models where the law of one price fails—i.e., models with equilibrium wage dispersion. We begin considering ex ante heterogeneous workers, but highlight a problem with this approach: If search is costly the market shuts down. We then assume homogeneous workers but ex post heterogeneous matches. This model is robust to search costs, and delivers equilibrium wage dispersion. However, we prove that the law of two prices holds: Equilibrium implies at most two wages. We explore other models, including one combining ex ante and ex post heterogeneity which is robust and delivers more realistic wage dispersion.     

The measurement of income mobility: A partial ordering approach

Summary. Given a set of longitudinal data pertaining to two populations, a question of interest is the following: Which population has experienced a greater extent of income mobility? The aim of the present paper is to develop a systematic way of answering this question. We first put forth four axioms for income movement-mobility indices, and show that a familiar class of measures is characterized by these axioms. An unambiguous (partial) ordering is then defined as the intersection of the (complete) orderings induced by the mobility measures which belong to the characterized class; a transformation of income distributions is “more mobile” than another if, and only if, the former is ranked higher than the latter for all mobility measures which satisfy our axioms. Unfortunately, our mobility ordering depends on a parameter, and therefore, it is not readily apparent how one can apply it to panel data directly. In the second part of the paper, therefore, we derive several sets of parameter-free necessary and sufficient conditions which allow one to use the proposed mobility ordering in making unambiguous income mobility comparisons in practice. Received: July 12, 1995; revised version: May 13, 1997     

Poverty growth in Scandinavian countries: A Sen multi-decomposition

We show in this paper that the growth rate of the Sen index is multi-decomposable, that is, decomposable simultaneously by subgroups and income sources. The multi-decomposition of the poverty growth yields respectively: the growth rate of the poverty incidence (poverty rate) decomposed by subgroups, the growth rate of the poverty depth (poverty gap ratios) decomposed by sources and subgroups, and the growth rate of inequality decomposed by sources and subgroups. We demonstrate that the multi-decomposition is not unique. It is mainly dependent on poverty lines defined on the space of income sources. An application to Scandinavian countries shows that poverty lines based on non-correlation between the income sources imply serious risks of underestimation of the contribution levels of the different components of the global poverty growth. The main contribution of our paper is to pay particular attention to the poverty growth and its source components in order to avoid underestimation of poverty growth.