I3 - Welfare and Poverty
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Income Inequality in Canada
Data show that income inequality in Canada increased substantially during the 1980s and first half of the 1990s but has been relatively stable over the past 25 years. This increase was felt mainly by low-income earners and younger people, while older people benefited from higher retirement income. -
Labor Demand Response to Labor Supply Incentives: Lessons from the German Mini-Job Reform
How do firms change their employment decisions when tax benefits for low-earning workers are expanded? Some firms increase employment overall, whereas others replace high-earning workers with low-earning workers, according to German linked employer-employee data. -
Identification of Random Resource Shares in Collective Households Without Preference Similarity Restrictions
Resource shares, defined as the fraction of total household spending going to each person in a household, are important for assessing individual material well-being, inequality and poverty. They are difficult to identify because consumption is measured typically at the household level, and many goods are jointly consumed, so that individual-level consumption in multi-person households is not directly observed. -
Sheltered Income: Estimating Income Under-Reporting in Canada, 1998 and 2004
We use data from the Survey of Financial Security and the Survey of Household Spending to estimate the incidence and extent of income under-reporting in Canada in 1998 and 2004. We estimate that the proportion of households under-reporting income is roughly 35 to 50 per cent in both years. -
Does Financial Integration Increase Welfare? Evidence from International Household-Level Data
Despite a vast empirical literature that assesses the impact of financial integration on the economy, evidence of substantial welfare gains from consumption risk sharing remains elusive. While maintaining the usual cross-country perspective of the literature, this paper explicitly accounts for household heterogeneity and thus relaxes three restrictive assumptions that have featured prominently in the past.