Neighbors’ income distribution: economic segregation and mixing in US urban neighborhoods

The paper describes within-neighborhood economic segregation in US metropolitan areas in 1985 and 1993. It uses the neighborhood clusters of the American housing survey, standardized by metropolitan area income and household size, to explore income distribution within neighborhoods at a scale much smaller than the census tract (a representative sample of households or ‘kernels’ and their 10 closest neighbors). Joint and conditional distributions portray neighbors’ characteristics conditional on the kernel’s housing tenure, race, and income. The paper documents both significant income mixing in the majority of US urban micro neighborhoods and the extent of income mixing within neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.     

Tax-benefit systems and differences in aggregate labour force participation: Comparative evidence from the Czech Republic and Hungary

This paper investigates the extent to which cross-country differences in aggregate participation rates can be explained by differences in tax-benefit systems. We take the example of two countries, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which – despite a lot of similarities – differ markedly in labour force participation rates. Using comparable individual-level labour supply estimates, we simulate how the aggregate participation rate would change in one country if the other country’s tax and social welfare system were adopted. The estimation results for the two countries are quite similar, suggesting that individual preferences are essentially identical in the two countries. The simulation results show that about one-third of the difference in the participation rates of the 15–74 year-old population and more than two-thirds of the participation of the prime-age population can be explained by differences in the tax-benefit systems.