the impacts of urban pricing on social and spatial inequalities the case study of lyon france with the aim of making a city sustainable this paper evaluates the impact of setting up urban toll on inequalities we use several indicators gini theil and atkinson indices to measure changes in the concentration of incomes and gravity based accessibility in the case of the lyon metropolitan area france we simulate a cordon pricing and evaluate its impacts on inequalities we adopt a comparison based approach to reduce the bias resulting from the spatial division in agreement with the literature we show that different inequality indicators produce contrasted and sometimes contradictory results both at the scale of zones or metropolitan level results from theil and atkinson indicators point out introducing a toll can reduce inequalities in the most peripheral zones although we observe an accessibility improvement particularly for central zones the first ring adjacent to the toll zone is the most adversely affected by toll

on optimal contracts for central bankers and inflation and exchange rate targeting regimes this paper analyzes the issues of discretion and commitment in monetary policy under an exchange rate targeting regime neither a linear state contingent inflation contract for the central bank nor an explicit state contingent inflation target combined with a weight conservative central bank can now achieve the commitment equilibrium it is shown that a state contingent contract conditioned on the exchange rate and past output can implement the commitment equilibrium contracts conditioned on the exchange rate and inflation and on inflation and past output can also mimic the optimal rule under commitment

are estimates of earnings inequality sensitive to measurement choices a case study of canada in the 1980s while it is necessary that researchers make choices in order to estimate inequality the reasons for the measurement choices and their impact on inequality estimates have not been widely assessed this paper uses canadian data from the 1980s to analyse whether inequality estimates are sensitive to common measurement choices seemingly minor technical choices about the treatment of outlying observations such as the use of top income coded data exclusion of very high and low observations and differences among data sets in the capture of very high observations affect estimates of inequality further the impact of the treatment of outlying observations on inequality estimates are at least as large as the impact of measurement choices of a conceptual nature such as the income definition and population selection the sensitivity of inequality estimates to measurement choices which often remain invisible affect inferences about the relative degree of inequality at a given point in time among countries and

changing income inequalities within and between nations new evidence fresh data sources on cross national income are examined to document recent changes in the composition of world income inequality within and between nations new evidence shows that during the 1980s and 1990s the composition of world income inequality experienced a fundamental change characterized by the diminishing significance of between nation income differences and the growing prominence of within nation inequalities two competing trends account for this change 1 steady growth in the average level of income inequality within nations and 2 a decline in income inequality between nations these recent trends signify a reversal in one of the major legacies of the industrial revolution the internationalization of world income inequality across national borders the findings raise important questions for future studies of cross national inequality and development

inflation and reputation in many macroeconomic models with rational expectations optimal policy is time inconsistent and therefore announced policy may not be credible this paper models the government s credibility explicitly using kreps and wilson s analysis time consistent optimal government policy emerges as a sequential equilibrium in a repeated game this policy is at least as good as the inconsistent optimal policy and dominates the consistent policy when reputational effects are ignored thus the analysis resolves the problem of specifying a credible optimal policy in such models the results show why attempts to disinflate may lead to recession even with perfectly flexible prices this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

risk perceptions and distributional judgments abstract we examine the role of laboratory questionnaire experiments and recent applied empirical research on attitudes in understanding the relationships between people s perceptions of inequality and their perceptions of risk we consider risk in three interpretations in vacuo in day to day life and in the original position

measuring lifetime poverty abstract this paper presents an axiomatic framework for measuring lifetime poverty over multiple periods for an individual we argue that lifetime poverty is influenced by both the snapshot poverty of each period and the poverty level of the permanent lifetime consumption it is also influenced by how poverty spells are distributed over the lifetime we axiomatically characterize classes of lifetime poverty indices and derive dominance conditions of poverty orderings for both individual and societal lifetime poverty measurements

a note on the poum effect with heterogeneous social mobility abstract we study the determinants of the steady state poum effect in a model where the individuals evaluate their expected future income using both their current income and observable characteristics such as education race or gender

dalton improving indirect tax reform a tax reform is dalton improving if it improves social welfare for all possible social welfare functions that conform to hugh dalton s principle of transfers according to this principle there exists a prior social ranking of households and a transfer is approved if it it distributes from high ranking rich to low ranking poor households without altering the ranking itself in this paper the authors develop a procedure for identifying marginal dalton improving reforms in the context of indirect taxation the methodology is illustrated using data on excise taxes in the united kingdom copyright 1995 by american economic association

ethnic inequality and poverty in malaysia since may 1969 part 1 inequality abstract the race riots that broke out in kuala lumpur in may 1969 triggered a national public effort to greatly reduce both malaysia s longstanding ethnic inequalities and its high incidence of poverty this paper studies how various measures of ethnic inequality evolved since 1969 two conceptual distinctions are emphasized that between income inequality and polarization on the one hand and that between relative and absolute inequality on the other over the last 50 years the poorest ethnic group the bumiputera have had the highest growth rate of household incomes which helped assure a substantial long term decline in relative between group inequality which in turn substantially reduced overall income inequality measures of ethnic polarization moved highly synchronously with between group inequality the differential growth rates by ethnicity were not enough to prevent rising absolute inequality given the extent of the initial ethnic disparities despite the progress against relative inequality malaysia s absolute disparities by ethnicity are now even larger than 50 years ago the second paper of this two part paper examines the contribution of lower relative ethnic inequality to the country s progress against poverty

the estimation of welfare levels of a cardinal utility function in order to measure an individual s welfare function of income wfi van praag 1968 1971 the individual is confronted with various welfare levels and asked to associate income levels with them the welfare levels are given as verbal qualifications like good sufficient bad etc it is assumed that these verbal qualifications correspond to intervals of equal length of the range of the wfi here we want to test this assumption a first principal component model is applied the intervals of the range of the wfi associated with the verbal qualifications are estimated and a test of their equality is performed

a note on the measurement of mobility abstract this paper shows that the minimum discrimination information statistic suggested by kullback can be regarded as a measure of mobility we also show the use of the kullback measure for testing certain statistical hypotheses concerning mobility

credibility reputation and the mexican peso crisis a model emphasizing the tradeoff between the costs of changes of domestic interest rates and exchange rate stability is used to assess the role of credibility and reputational factors in the lead up to the december 1994 crisis of the mexican peso devaluation expectations are decomposed into the probability that the authorities do not truly put a high weight on exchange rate stability and the probability that an exogenous shock will make a devaluation the preferred policy estimates indicate that prior to the peso collapse there was no significant increase in devaluation fears and no perceived shift in the authorities policy preferences but the increase in the differential that occurred after the devaluation may have resulted from such a shift

biased perceptions of income distribution and preferences for redistribution evidence from a survey experiment abstract individual perceptions of income distribution play a vital role in political economy and public finance models yet there is little evidence regarding their origins or accuracy this study examines how individuals form these perceptions and explores their potential impact on preferences for redistribution a tailored household survey provides original evidence on systematic biases in individuals evaluations of their own relative position in the income distribution the study discusses one of the mechanisms that may generate such biases based on the extrapolation of information from endogenous reference groups and presents some suggestive evidence that this mechanism has significant explanatory power the impact of these biased perceptions on attitudes toward redistributive policies is studied by means of an experimental design that was incorporated into the survey which provided consistent information on the own ranking within the income distribution to a randomly selected group of respondents the evidence suggests that those who had overestimated their relative position and thought that they were relatively richer than they were tend to demand higher levels of redistribution when informed of their true ranking

rational expectations and policy credibility following a change in regime we examine the dynamic path of an economy after a change in regime when neither the policy to be followed nor the reactions of the public are known the model is an application of kreps and wilson s reputation model to barro and gordon s macroeconomic policy game equilibrium is defined to be the dynamically consistent solution to a game between the government and the private sector it involves mixed strategies and bayesian learning by both sides until the uncertainty about government and public behaviour is resolved the absence of complete credibility of government policy and intransigence of private sector wage demands increase the output loss of disinflation the analysis also sheds light on the strategic nature of economic policymaking and the role of information in macroeconomics

the slave trade and the origins of mistrust in africa in a recent study nunn 2008 examines the long term impacts of africa s slave trade he finds that the slave trade which occurred over a period of more than 400 years had a significant negative effect on long term economic development although the article arguably identifies a negative causal relationship between the slave trade and income today the analysis is unable to establish the exact causal mechanisms underlying this reduced form relationship in this article we examine one of the channels through which the slave trade may affect economic development today combining contemporary individual level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group we ask whether the slave trade caused a culture of mistrust to develop within africa initially slaves were captured primarily through state organized raids and warfare but as the trade progressed the environment of ubiquitous insecurity caused individuals to turn on others including friends and family members and to kidnap trick and sell each other into slavery sigismund wilhelm koelle 1854 p e h hair 1965 charles piot 1996 we hypothesize that in this environment a culture of mistrust may have evolved which may persist to this day we show that current differences in trust levels within africa can be traced back to the transatlantic and indian ocean slave trades combining contemporary individual level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group we find that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today evidence from a variety of identification strategies suggests that the relationship is causal examining causal mechanisms we show that most of the impact of the slave trade is through factors that are internal to the individual such as cultural norms beliefs and values jel j15 n57 z13

the invisible hand and the grabbing hand evidence from a survey of 105 shop owners in moscow and warsaw shows that the reliance on private protection as well as the burden of regulation and corruption are much greater in moscow the evidence suggests that the invisible hand model of government better fits the warsaw local government and the grabbing hand model is more appropriate for moscow the evidence implies that the singular focus on the speed of economic reforms to understand the success of transition is misplaced and that the quality of government may be as essential this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

partial ordering of unpredictable mobility with welfare implications we propose a partial ordering of unpredictable mobility in the spirit of blackwell s ordering of information structures the proposed ordering ranks mobility matrices according to the degree to which elements in a given set are likely to move from one state to another independently of their origin furthermore for an important class of transition structures our proposed ordering implies ordering thus carrying significant welfare implications moreover whenever it exists our partial ordering functions as a sufficient condition for a class of renowned mobility measures and thereby generates for a subset of transition matrices unanimous ranking among mobility indices that are not generally consistent with one another

inequality aversion versus risk aversion inequality aversion and risk aversion are widely assumed in economic models however existing economic literature fails to distinguish between the two this paper presents methodology and a laboratory experiment which separates inequality aversion from risk aversion in a set of laboratory experiments subjects had to choose between two risky alternatives which pay meaningful prizes with the same individual risk but different levels of egalitarianism thus the choice of the more egalitarian alternative implies a higher level of inequality aversion the experiment was conducted among children some of whom live on a communal system kibbutz and some in the city

reducing inequalities toward the development of a market for income inequality abstract the objective of this study is to propose the development of a market for income inequality by specifying a firm s contribution to income inequality and outlining a simple model to find the equilibrium price for a given target of income inequality reduction the paper reviews the concepts of firm heterogeneity and externalities in relation to income inequality it then proposes a model by establishing income inequality reduction targets for a population of firms presenting a marginal income inequality reduction cost curve and matching demand and supply to derive the equilibrium price and ends by simulating a market for income inequality reduction using data from a sample of fifteen firms this paper shifts the focus of income inequality research and policy to the firm and proposes a market based mechanism for firms to reduce income inequality

how polarized is the global income distribution abstract the interest in the level of global inequality has surged in recent years this paper complements existing estimates of global inequality by providing the first estimates of the level of bipolarization of the global income distribution during 1975 2010 global bipolarization declined substantially according to relative measures while it increased according to absolute measures the results mirror trends in global inequality over the same period

ranking income distributions a large variety of policy questions involve choices between social states and a consequent ordering of the feasible alternatives when these social states are related to the levels of welfare experienced by individuals or households two central issues stand out in determining the relative desirability of different social outcomes one of these is the essentially positive exercise of achieving comparability between households with different characteristics such as composition or preferences operating in different environments for example facing different price structures the other concerns the normative judgments implicit in the evaluation of alternative allocations of resourcesthe emphasis placed on inequality between households and the extent to which greater inequality can be compensated by higher average living standards this paper focuses on the second of these issues and in doing so we abstract from the problem of household comparability by considering a population of n households identical in all respects except for their incomes the question of ordering social states then becomes one of ranking income distributions over a group of anonymous households or individuals borrowing the usual assumptions imposed on consumer preferences we may suppose that a social ordering of income distributions can be represented by a welfare function 2

a little fairness may induce a lot of redistribution in democracy we use a model of self centered inequality aversion suggested by fehr and schmidt 1999 to study voting on redistribution we theoretically identify two classes of conditions when an empirically plausible amount of fairness preferences induces redistribution through referenda we test the predictions of the adapted inequality aversion model in a simple redistribution experiment and flnd that it predicts voting outcomes far better than the standard model of voting assuming rationality and strict self interest

political preferences for the pork barrel a generalization this paper provides a rational explanation for the observation of oversized coalitions often approaching unanimous size in the realm of distributive policies distributive policies are those which concentrate benefits in specific geographic areas states congressional districts while spreading costs through general taxation the explanation offered here that legislators may rationally prefer universalism to hard ball coalition politics generalizes earlier work of weingast and fiorina in particular it extends their results to pork barrel politics i e projects that are economically inefficient and demonstrates how packages of economically inefficient projects can nevertheless be politically popular the main theoretical feature that induces preferences for universalism is uncertainty over the composition of winning coalitions and consequently the desire for the political insurance that universalism provides

sequential dominance and weighted utilitarianism abstract one well known way to make heterogeneous welfare comparisons comparing distributions in which households differ in both income and needs is atkinson and bourguignon s atkinson a b bourguignon f 1987 income distribution and differences in needs in feiwel g r ed arrow and the foundations of the theory of economic policy macmillan london pp 350 370 sequential generalized lorenz dominance criterion we show that it suffices to be a weighted utilitarian with higher weights for the more needy to accept the sequential generalized lorenz dominance criterion

the meaning and measurement of income mobility abstract income mobility may be seen as arising from two sources i the transfer of income among individuals with total income held constant and ii a change in the total amount of income available in this paper we propose several sensible properties defining the concept of income mobility and show that an easily applicable measure of mobility is uniquely implied by these properties we also show that the resulting measure is additively decomposable into the two sources listed above namely mobility due to the transfer of income within a given structure and mobility due to economic growth or contraction finally these results are compared and contrasted with other mobility concepts and measures in the literature journal of economic literature classification numbers d31 d63

on evaluating social welfare by sequential generalized lorenz dominance the sequential generalized lorenz sgl ordering is introduced by atkinson and bourguignon 1987 to rank heterogeneous income distributions it is well known that this ordering has a strong utilitarian support in this note we show that one does not have to be a utilitarian to accept this welfare ordering the sgl ordering is supported by all increasing swfs which record an increase in overall welfare when a cardinal welfare transfer is made from less needy to needier

moral hypocrisy power and social preferences abstract we study how individuals adjust their judgment of fairness and unfairness when they are in the position of spectators before and after making real decisions and how this adjustment depends on the actions they take in the game we find that norms that appear universal instead take into account the players bargaining power also individuals adjust their judgments after playing the game for real money when they behaved more selfishly and only in games where choices have no strategic consequence we interpret this possibly self deceptive adjustment of judgments to actions as moral hypocrisy this behavior appears produced by the attempt to strike a compromise between self image and payoffs so as to release oneself of one s responsibility for selfish behavior

equity measurement in facility location analysis a review and framework abstract in selecting sites for facilities especially in the public sector the issue of equity is becoming increasingly important beginning with the work of mumphreys et al 1971 mcallister 1976 and savas 1978 a substantial literature has developed that incorporates equity in facility siting decision models despite this level of interest however there has been little agreement in these models as to how equity should be measured further except for some recent works there has generally been little comparison of alternative measures or assesment of their relative value let alone any consensus on the best measure s to use perhaps even more surprising is the great number and variety of measures employed the motivation for this paper is to address these problems and provide for researchers a base from which issues of equity can be included in facility siting models more specifically we seek to review the equity literature as it pertains to facility location assemble the set of measures that have been developed and introduce a framework and common notation for organizing them we also will discuss approaches that can be used to select an appropriate measure of equity

dispersive equity and social risk dispersive equity is concerned with the impact of life threatening risks from alternative policy decisions on homogeneous groups in a population it is not addressed to the disutility of various numbers of fatalities that might occur but rather to how fatalities are distributed over the groups although dispersive equity has long been recognized as an important component of some policy decisions it has received little formal treatment within the matrix of salient factors for such decisions our purpose is to advance its formal development this is done within a formulation based on probability distributions over potential fatality sets the formulation gives rise to four distinct but not independent equity concepts individual risk equity group risk equity dispersive equity and social outcome equity each of these is analyzed but special attention is given to dispersive equity the paper also comments on relationships between total equity and its four components and between total equity and the dis

reign in hell or serve in heaven a cross country journey into the relative vs absolute perceptions of wellbeing abstract questionnaires exploring the relativist vs absolutist perception of wellbeing are administered to 3883 students in eight different countries four low income countries bolivia brazil kenya and laos 1924 respondents and four high income countries italy sweden switzerland and the uk 1959 respondents our data reveal that wellbeing is perceived mainly in relative terms with the strength of relativism being higher for respondents in high income countries however when the satisfaction of some basic needs is at stake the absolutist concern becomes powerful personal characteristics such as gender and background of studies have a significant role in determining respondents perception of wellbeing finally additional insights emerge from our study interpersonal comparisons take place by looking both upward and downward along the income scale not only income ranking but also the magnitude of reference incomes plays a role and the perception of wellbeing is more elastic to absolute rather than relative income

perceptional inequality and preferential judgements an empirical examination of distributional axioms there are two categories of income distribution evaluations first the more or less value free perception of income inequality as a statistical dispersion and second the valuation of income distributions according to an explicit social welfare function which is meant to capture all of society s value judgements these societal value judgements can be expressed in the form of preferences whereas the inequality perception of income distributions appeals to an observer s sober judgement the revelation of preferences with respect to specific income distributions appeals to his or her sentiments

explaining interstate variation in income inequality this paper investigates interstate variation in income inequality by avoiding inequality indices and focusing directly on the lorenz curve the authors provide a more general explanation of the differences in inequality they find that mean family income the standard deviation of years of schooling per capita educational expenditure and property income are robust predictors of inequality of particular interest is their finding that ceteris paribus higher per capita education expenditures tend to be associated with states that have income inequality which is greater than the u s average copyright 1992 by mit press

more equal but less mobile education financing and intergenerational mobility in italy and in the us a centralised and egalitarian school system reduces the cost of education for poor families and so it should reduce income inequality and make intergenerational mobility easier in this paper we provide evidence that italy compared to the usa displays less income inequality as expected given the type of school system but also less intergenera tional upward mobility between occupations and between education levels we explore some of the reasons which can explain this puzzling result and conclude that in a world in which family background is important for labor market success a centralised and egalitarian tertiary education does not necessarily help poor children and may take away from them a fundamental tool to prove their talent and to compete with rich children 1999 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

transparency reputation and credibility under floating and pegged exchange rates this paper shows that if the cost of importing foreign inflation and real exchange rate shocks are not too high then the equilibrium nominal exchange rate regime for a country with a credibility problem is a peg under which credibility is higher and inflation is lower than under a float this holds true although devaluations of the pegged rate are assumed to be costless the reason is that as realized inflation is not perfectly controllable planned inflation under a float is private information in contrast since the exchange rate can be perfectly controlled pegging resolves the private information problem is more transparent and makes reputation more effective

central bank independence revisited the case for central bank independence cbi while not a new one has been strengthened by a growing body of empirical evidence by recent developments in economic theory and by the temper of the times the case is a strong one 1 which is becoming part of the washington orthodoxy the purposes of this paper are both to make more precise the type of cbi that is likely to enhance economic performance and to point to some remaining open issues and anomalies i start with the two theoretical approaches to cbi

the stabilizing properties of a nominal gnp rule the author examines the ability of a nominal gnp rule for monetary policy to stabilize output and inflation other regimes considered are a money rule an exchange rate rule a price level rule and discretion the rules compare favorably to discretion to the extent that a time consistent commitment to a nominal anchor is needed to eliminate an inflationary bias in the economy the choice among the four rules depends on the relative magnitudes of the disturbances considered supply shocks velocity shocks and exchange rate shocks the nominal gnp rule dominates the exchange rate and other rules for plausible parameter values copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

three meanings of intergenerational mobility we axiomatize three different motivations for being concerned about intergenerational mobility mobility as a description of movement as an indication of equality of opportunity and as an indication of equality of life chances these three motivations are shown to be incompatible none of the existing measures is acceptable as an indicator of equality of opportunity or equality of life chances we propose two new measures of intergenerational mobility which more adequately reflect these concerns

an experimental test of the concentration index the concentration index is widely used to measure income related inequality in health no insight exists however whether the concentration index connects with people s preferences about distributions of income and health and whether a reduction in the concentration index reflects an increase in social welfare we explored this question by testing the central assumption underlying the concentration index and found that it was systematically violated we also tested the validity of alternative health inequality measures that have been proposed in the literature our data showed that decreases in the spread of income and health were considered socially desirable but decreases in the correlation between income and health not necessarily support for a condition implying that the inequality in the distribution of income and in the distribution of health can be considered separately was mixed

redistributive effects of minimal equal sacrifice taxation we examine the circumstances under which minimal equal sacrifice taxation reduces income inequality focusing on absolute sacrifice and relative inequality we show that after tax incomes are more equally distributed than before tax incomes and that after tax inequality decreases with the revenue to be raised if and only if the elasticity of the marginal utility of income is decreasing however other things equal after tax inequality is shown to decline as the utility function becomes more concave we investigate next how these conclusions extend when one takes the absolute inequality view and considers that it is the relative loss in utility that has to be equalized across individuals

measurement of income inequality experimental test by questionnaire abstract we reconsider some of the basic assumptions of the literature on inequality analysis students views on the meaning of inequality comparisons were elicited by means of a questionnaire involving both numerical and verbal questions the responses suggest that two important axioms the principle of transfers and decomposability are not universally accepted

unit consistent decomposable inequality measures this paper introduces a new axiom the unit consistency axiom into inequality measurement this new axiom requires the ordinal inequality rankings rather than the cardinal indices to be unaffected when incomes are expressed in different units i argue that unit consistency is an indispensable axiom for the measurement of income inequality when unit consistency is combined with decomposability i show that the unit consistent decomposable class of inequality measures is a two parameter extension of the one parameter generalized entropy class the extended class accommodates a variety of value judgments and includes different types of inequality measures

incentives information and organizational form we model an organization as a hierarchy of managers erected on top of a technology here consisting of a collection of plants in our framework the role of a manager is to take steps to reduce the adverse consequences of shocks that affect the plants beneath him we argue that different organizational forms give rise to different information about managers performance and therefore differ according to how effective incentives can be in encouraging a good performance in particular we show that under certain assumptions the m form multi divisional form is likely to provide better incentives than the u form unitary form because it promotes yardstick competition i e relative performance evaluation more effectively we conclude by presenting evidence that the assumptions on which this comparison rests are satisfied for chinese data

measuring social mobility abstract the paper considers the ranking of mobility matrices in a simple markov model of social mobility the approach is the dynamic counterpart ot the static inequality ranking of income distributions by the lorenz curve the derived partial ordering is motivated by welfare considerations is shown to be equivalent to same intuitive mobility concepts and is used to screen some immobility indices the equivalence of the ranking with the permanent income lorenz ordering gives support to the claim that this approach is the natural extension of kolm s the optimal production of social justice in public economics j margolis and h guitton eds macmillan london 1969 atkinson s on the measurement of inequality j econ theory2 1970 244 263 and dasgupta sen and starrett s notes on the measurement of inequality j econ theory6 1973 180 187 approaches journal of economic literature classification numbers d31 d63 j62

consistent income tax structures when households are heterogeneous the paper examines the redistributive impact of income taxation for heterogeneous populations an equivalent income function is introduced in order to adjust the incomes of different types of households and the redistributive performance of the tax system is evaluated by comparing the lorenz curves of the distributions of before and after tax equivalent incomes inequality reduction after tax imposes mild consistency conditions which are met by most current tax systems if the inequality reducing effect of taxation is required to be independent of the reference household type then the structure of the equivalent income function is fully determined by the inequality concept journal of economic literature classification numbers d31 d63 h24

decomposing economic mobility transition matrices the intergenerational mobility literature has consistently found that the distribution of adult economic outcomes differ markedly depending on parental economic status yet much remains to be understood about the drivers or determinants of this relationship existing literature on potential drivers focuses primarily on mean effects to help provide a more complete picture of the potential forces driving economic persistence we propose a method to decompose transition matrices and related indices specifically we decompose differences between an estimated transition matrix and a benchmark transition matrix into portions attributable to differences in characteristics between individuals from different households a composition effect and portions attributable to differing returns to these characteristics between individuals from different households a structure effect we also incorporate a detailed decomposition based on copula theory that decomposes the composition effect into portions attributable to specific covariates and their interactions we illustrate our method using data on white men from the 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth estimation is based on an extended mincer equation that includes cognitive and non cognitive measures to address the potential endogeneity of education we implement an iv strategy that allows us to estimate causal effects and investigate the role of unobserved ability

stochastic monotonicity in intergenerational mobility tables summary the aim of this paper is to test for stochastic monotonicity in intergenerational socio economic mobility tables in other words we question whether having a parent from a high socio economic status is never worse than having one with a lower status using existing inferential procedures for testing unconditional stochastic monotonicity we first test a set of 149 intergenerational mobility tables in 35 different countries and find that monotonicity cannot be rejected in hardly any table in addition we propose new testing procedures for testing conditional stochastic monotonicity and investigate whether monotonicity still holds after conditioning on a number of covariates such as education cognitive and non cognitive skills based on the ncds cohort data from the uk our results provide evidence that monotonicity holds even conditionally moreover we do not find large differences in our results when comparing social class and wage class mobility copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd