Wealth Accumulation and Factors Accounting for Success

We use detailed income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements constructed for households in a long monthly panel in an emerging market economy, and some recent contributions in economic theory, to document and better understand the factors underlying success in achieving upward mobility in the distribution of net worth. Wealth inequality is decreasing over time, and many households work their way out of poverty and lower wealth over the seven year period. The accounts establish that, mechanically, this is largely due to savings rather than incoming gifts and remittances. In turn, the growth of net worth can be decomposed household by household into the savings rate and how productively that savings is used, the return on assets (ROA). The latter plays the larger role. ROA is, in turn, positively correlated with higher education of household members, younger age of the head, and with a higher debt/asset ratio and lower initial wealth, so it seems from cross-sections that the financial system is imperfectly channeling resources to productive and poor households. Household fixed effects account for the larger part of ROA, and this success is largely persistent, undercutting the story that successful entrepreneurs are those that simply get lucky. Persistence does vary across households, and in at least one province with much change and increasing opportunities, ROA changes as households move over time to higher-return occupations. But for those households with high and persistent ROA, the savings rate is higher, consistent with some micro founded macro models with imperfect credit markets. Indeed, high ROA households save by investing in their own enterprises and adopt consistent financial strategies for smoothing fluctuations. More generally growth of wealth, savings levels and/or rates are correlated with TFP and the household fixed effects that are the larger part of ROA.     

Public insurance and private savings: who is affected and by how much?

This paper employs a recently developed instrumental quantile regression method to investigate the effect of Medicaid on household savings across different wealth groups. It finds that the disincentive effect of Medicaid on household savings is heavily concentrated in the middle net‐worth households. In contrast, the effects on the bottom and top net‐worth households are quite small and insignificant. These heterogeneous incentive effects are partly explained by Medicaid asset tests. Our findings hold regardless of whether affluence is measured in terms of wealth or income. They suggest that despite generating substantial crowd‐out for the mean household, Medicaid expansions are unlikely to discourage the savings of the poorest households. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tenure Choice with Sample Selection: Differences among Alternative Samples

Most tenure choice models using cross-sectional data have used either a sample of recent movers or a sample comprising all households. There are problems with estimating both types of models in cross-sectional data. A sample of recent movers oversamples renters, and a sample of all households will yield estimates based on household decisions made in the past. This research designs a method to correct for sample selection in a sample of recent movers. There are large differences in the importance of age, immigrant status, and immigrant length of stay as predictors of homeownership. At the same time, income effects are similar across models.     

Slums in developing countries: New evidence for Indonesia

This paper uses Indonesian data to provide new evidence on the links between household and dwelling characteristics in a developing country. The results show that higher income and education lead to occupancy of dwellings with better structural characteristics, an effect that is reinforced if the household is large and contains few children. Religion also matters, with non-Buddhist households occupying dwellings with worse structural characteristics. The directions of these effects are mostly consistent with separate estimates of household bid-rent functions, which show that willingness-to-pay for better housing attributes rises with income and education.     

Impact of the food stamp program on selected food nutrients purchased by low income households

The objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that the food Stamp Program (FSP) improves the nutritional status of the low income households, particularly, in the southern region of the United States. Empirical results are obtained via application of the Box-Cox transformation technique to sample data developed from the Bureau of Labor Statistics 1972–1973 Consumer Expenditure Diary Survey. The relatively small income elasticities suggest that policies aimed at generating nutritionally adequate diets through income transfers may not be as effective as the FSP in improving the nutritional status of low income households. Analyses of the impacts of other socio-economic variables suggest that some pattern of nutrient purchasing behavior are evident over different stages of household life cycle. Furthermore, race of household and level of educational attainment of the homemaker are found to have significant effects on the purchase of selected nutrients.     

D‐optimal designs for a continuous predictor in longitudinal trials with discrete‐time survival endpoints

In designing an experiment with one single, continuous predictor, the questions are composed of what is the optimal number of the predictor's values, what are these values, and how many subjects should be assigned to each of these values. In this study, locally D‐optimal designs for such experiments with discrete‐time event occurrence data are studied by using a sequential construction algorithm. Using the Weibull survival function for modeling the underlying time to event function, it is shown that the optimal designs for a linear effect of the predictor have two points that coincide with the design region's boundaries, but the design weights highly depend on the predictor effect size and its direction, the survival pattern, and the number of time points. For a quadratic effect of the predictor, three or four design points are needed.     

WEALTH EFFECTS AND MACROECONOMIC DYNAMICS

The effect of wealth on consumption is an issue of long‐standing interest to economists. Conventional wisdom suggests that fluctuations in household wealth have driven major swings in economic activity both in the United States and abroad. This paper considers the so‐called consumption wealth effects. There is an extensive existing literature on wealth effects that has yielded some insights. For example, research has documented the relationship between aggregate household wealth and aggregate consumption over time, and a large number of household‐level studies suggest that wealth effects are larger for households facing credit constraints. However, there are also many unresolved issues regarding the influence of household wealth on consumption. We review the most important of these issues and argue that there is a need for much more research in these areas as well as better data sources for conducting such analysis.     

The Optimality of Single-group Designs for Certain Mixed Models

In this paper optimal designs for the estimation of the fixed effects (population parameters) in a certain class of mixed models are investigated. Two classes of designs are compared: the class of single-group designs, where all individuals are observed under the same approximate design, and the class of more-group designs with the same mean number of observations per individual as before, where each individual can be observed under a different approximate design. It is shown that any design that is Φ-optimal in the class of single-group designs is also Φ-optimal in the larger class of more-group designs. The considered optimality criteria only have to satisfy mild assumptions, which is eg the case for the D-criterion and all linear criteria.     

The measurement and structure of household wealth

This paper deals with methodological issues that arise in measuring household wealth. Two prominent American household surveys—the PSID and SCF—rely on different methodological approaches to the measurement of household wealth. In particular, SCF oversamples high-income households and has a far more extensive set of questions. In the top one percent of the wealth distribution, better measures of wealth are related to over-sampling of very wealthy households and the number of questions that are asked. However, one can characterize total household wealth holdings for the overwhelming majority of households with a relatively moderate number of questions. When successive waves of wealth modules are used to compute savings, the verdict on quality is more cautious, in part due to the inherently larger role measurement error plays in any first difference formulation.     

Effects of residential relocation on household and commuting expenditures in Shanghai, China

Over the past three decades, China's cities have undergone massive spatial restructuring in the wake of market reforms and economic growth. One consequence has been a rapid migration of urban residents to the periphery. Some movers have been forced out either by rising urban rents or government reclamation of their residences. Others have relocated willingly to modernized housing or for other lifestyle reasons. This article examines the effects of relocation to the urban edge on household well-being. It explores the factors underlying changes in housing and transportation costs as households move to the periphery. The research also examines whether those who moved involuntarily are affected differently from those who moved by choice. Results show that, relative to those who moved by choice, involuntary movers are disproportionately and adversely affected in terms of job accessibility, commute time, housing consumption and disposable income. The findings also show that, compared with higher-income households, lower-income groups are disproportionately affected in relation to housing costs, accessibility losses, disposable income and household worker composition. These results indicate that relocation compensation for involuntarily relocated households should be expanded to include more than just housing value: it should encompass urban location changes, household needs and relocation costs.     

What does Variation in Survey Design Reveal about the Nature of Measurement Errors in Household Consumption?

We randomly assigned eight different consumption surveys to obtain evidence on the nature of measurement errors in estimates of household consumption. Regressions using data from more error‐prone designs are compared with results from a ‘gold standard’ survey. Measurement errors appear to have a mean‐reverting negative correlation with true consumption, especially for food and especially for rural households.     

Inequality and catching-up under decreasing marginal impatience

This paper examines how endogenous time preference interacts with inequalities in economic development. We consider two distinct groups of households with intrinsic inequality (e.g., capitalists and workers), and show that (i) under decreasing marginal impatience (DMI), an unequal society may be preferable for poor households than an egalitarian one in which every household owns an equal share of asset; (ii) poor households tend to benefit more under DMI than CMI (constant marginal impatience) from positive shocks; (iii) inequality exhibits a sharp inverted-U shape as more people become rich, which should be good news for developing countries in catching up; and (iv) a tax on capital income reduces poor households’ income when the fraction of the rich is sufficiently small. We also examine immigration and discuss capital mobility.     

探析园林景观设计中的色彩设计

色彩作用于人的眼睛,人们不仅会产生对各种颜色的感受,还会产生情绪和其它一些心理效应。色彩既可以装点生活,美化环境,给人一种美的享受。也可能刺激人们的视觉给人以烦躁、沉闷的情绪。与众多设计要素一样,色彩是现代园林景观环境设计中需要关注的要素之一。在景观视觉效果中起着越来越重要的作用,影响我们的心理,也改变着我们的生活,我们只有通过精炼、提取、抽象,实现色彩与园林景观的协调统一,才能升华至色彩组合的艺术美,才能成为园林景观环境"师法"的对象。因此作为环境艺术的景观设计对于色彩的设计应用就尤为重要。     

Endogenous household interaction

Most econometric models of intrahousehold behavior assume that household decision making is efficient, i.e., utility realizations lie on the Pareto frontier. In this paper, we investigate this claim by adding a number of participation constraints to the household allocation problem. Short-run constraints ensure that each spouse obtains a utility level at least equal to what they would realize under (inefficient) Nash equilibrium. Long-run constraints ensure that each spouse obtains a utility level at least equal to what they would realize by cheating on the efficient allocation and receiving Nash equilibrium payoffs in all successive periods. Given household characteristics and the (common) discount factor of the spouses, not all households may be able to attain payoffs on the Pareto frontier. We estimate these models using a Method of Simulated Moments estimator and data from one wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that both short- and long-run constraints are binding for sizable proportions of households in the sample. We conclude that it is important to carefully model the constraint sets household members face when modeling household allocation decisions, and to allow for the possibility that efficient outcomes may not be implementable for some households.     

Challenges of green consumption in China: a household energy use perspective

To encourage economic progress, China's government has been pushing domestic consumption as a substitute for its waning growth in investment and exports. It has also been promoting greener policies for growth, of which green consumerism is a prime component. By examining the economy through the lens of household energy consumption, this paper lays out the challenges the nation must overcome through green consumption. We explore the trends in household energy use and decompose energy used indirectly by households into six factors: changes in total population, urbanization rate, energy efficiency, interindustry input mix, household consumption preferences, and per capita household consumption level. Doing so yields insights into how progress in industrial technology, household income, urbanization, and lifestyles has affected energy use in the production of goods and services used by households. It also offers policy suggestions on how China might guide lifestyle changes to effect green consumption.     

EXTENSIONS TO THE MULTIPLIER DECOMPOSITION APPROACH IN A SAM FRAMEWORK: AN APPLICATION TO VIETNAM

The aim of this paper is to provide an extension of a technique recently introduced by Pyatt and Round (2006) to decompose each element of the ‘global multiplier matrix’ in ‘microscopic detail’ in order to capture the linkages between each household groups’ income and the exogenously injected income of other accounts. The methodology we propose allows dividing the impact of exogenous injections into four different effects: direct-direct effect (D-D); direct-indirect effect (D-I); indirect-direct effect (I-D) and indirect-indirect effect (I-I). Results using the 2000 Vietnamese SAM show that the highest direct effects on the income of household groups are related to exogenous injections into the agricultural sector, while the highest indirect effects result from investing in other agriculture-related sectors such as, for example, food processing. Policy interventions focusing on the agricultural sector and on rural households will thus have the greatest effect on reducing the level of income inequality.     

Six families of efficient resolvable designs in three replicates

A resolvable incomplete-block design in three replicates is abstractly equivalent to a design for three factors whose effects are additive, but the efficiency factors for the two designs are not the same. Six families of known designs of the second type are used to construct designs of the first type.     

MEASURING SPILLOVER EFFECTS OF SHOCKS TO THE ALASKA ECONOMY: AN INTER-REGIONAL SOCIAL ACCOUNTING MATRIX (IRSAM) MODEL APPROACH

An inter-regional social accounting matrix (IRSAM) model is used to estimate the spillover effects occurring between economies of two US regions – (i) Alaska, which depends heavily on imports of commodities and factors of production from outside the region, and (ii) the rest of the US (RoUS). Multiplier decomposition is used to calculate intra-regional multipliers and spillover effects between the two regions. Results show that a significant percentage (46.3–70.8%) of the total secondary impacts of a shock to Alaskan industries leaks out of Alaska and flows to the RoUS. An analysis of household multipliers indicates that over 60% of the total secondary effects of an increase in Alaska household income accrues to the RoUS households. Policymakers are concerned with identifying the magnitude, nature, and geographic distribution of economic impacts from the policies they implement. The IRSAM model provides the framework for a better understanding of the intra-regional and spillover effects of policies.     

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), tenure choice,and residential land use

This paper extends the standard, urban, residential land-use model to analyze the effects of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance. On the demand side, households are differentiated by income and tenure; on the supply side, the cost of housing is related to the asset prices of land and structure and the cost of capital. Hypothesizing that capital cost is a function of household tenure and income, tenure is chosen to minimize this cost. The effect of FHA, then, is to expand the housing consumption of moderate-middle income households, by reducing their capital cost, while displacing those whose cost is not reduced.     

房屋拆迁会刺激家庭的金融市场参与吗？——一个心理账户的分析视角

在心理账户的作用下,拆迁补偿款的发放使得家庭更加倾向于参与金融市场投资,因此房屋拆迁将会显著提高家庭的金融市场参与度。对此,基于中国家庭金融调查（CHIP2013）和中国家庭追踪调查（CFPS2018）数据,运用工具变量法,实证检验了房屋拆迁对家庭金融市场参与的影响,结果表明,房屋拆迁会在一定程度上促进家庭的金融市场参与,且这一效果在消费支出少和金融资产余额多的家庭中更加显著。同时,中介效应检验结果发现,在房屋拆迁促进家庭金融市场参与的过程中,家庭可支配收入发挥了部分中介作用。这意味着,在房屋拆迁补偿中,不仅拆迁户应该警惕过度参与金融市场的非理性行为,而且政府和金融机构也应该组织和提供不同形式的金融教育,提高拆迁户的金融素养,从而预防拆迁返贫的悲剧。