The association of insurance expansions and the distribution of health status is still a matter we know little about. This paper draws upon new measures of pure (univariate) inequality and mobility ...which accommodate categorical data to understand how an expansion of public insurance may be related to both health inequality and mobility. These measures require a definition of individual's status that is either “downward looking” or “upward looking”. Using data from the Mexican Family Life Survey, a nationally representative longitudinal survey, we find that the distribution of health has worsened in Mexico between 2002 and 2009, although the change is only consistent for an upward looking definition status. Together with the lack of mobility in self‐reported health, we can thus conclude that Mexico has become more rigid over time despite the rapid public health expansion that took place over the 2000s decade. While further research on the potential drivers of health inequalities is needed, our findings suggest that insurance coverage alone may be not enough to reduce health disparities and promote health mobility. Indeed, health inequality and mobility likely depend on a myriad of factors beyond health care.
Measuring mobility Cowell, Frank A; Flachaire, Emmanuel
Quantitative economics,
July 2018, Letnik:
9, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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Our new approach to mobility measurement involves separating out the valuation of positions in terms of individual status (using income, social rank, or other criteria) from the issue of movement ...between positions. The quantification of movement is addressed using a general concept of distance between positions and a parsimonious set of axioms that characterize the distance concept and yield a class of aggregative indices. This class of indices induces a superclass of mobility measures over the different status concepts consistent with the same underlying data. We investigate the statistical inference of mobility indices using two well-known status concepts, related to income mobility and rank mobility. We also show how our superclass provides a more consistent and intuitive approach to mobility, in contrast to other measures in the literature, and illustrate its performance using recent data from China.
Mobility in China Chen, Yi; Cowell, Frank A.
The Review of income and wealth,
June 2017, Letnik:
63, Številka:
2
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The evidence on rank and income mobility in China reveals an important change around the year 2000. Using panel data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey we show that rank mobility fell ...markedly from the decade immediately preceding the millennium to the decade immediately following: in this respect China is becoming noticeably more rigid. By contrast income mobility has carried on increasing; so has income inequality. The simultaneous increase in rigidity and inequality presents China with a challenging policy problem.
We focus on a relatively neglected area of the tax-compliance literature in economics, the behaviour of firms. We examine the impact of alternative audit rules on receipts from a tax on profits in ...the context of strategic interdependence of firms. The enforcement policy can have an effect on firms' behaviour in two dimensions — their market decisions as well as their compliance behaviour. An appropriate design of the enforcement policy can thus have a “double dividend” by manipulating firms in both dimensions.
Piketty in the long run Cowell, Frank A.
The British journal of sociology,
12/2014, Letnik:
65, Številka:
4
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I examine the idea of ‘the long run’ in Piketty (2014) and related works. In contrast to simplistic interpretations of long‐run models of income‐ and wealth‐distribution Piketty (2014) draws on a ...rich economic analysis that models the intra‐ and inter‐generational processes that underly the development of the wealth distribution. These processes inevitably involve both market and non‐market mechanisms. To understand this approach, and to isolate the impact of different social and economic factors on inequality in the long run, we use the concept of an equilibrium distribution. However the long‐run analysis of policy should not presume that there is an inherent tendency for the wealth distribution to approach equilibrium.
We provide a parsimonious axiomatisation of the complete class of absolute inequality indices. Our approach uses only a weak form of decomposability and does not require
a priori that the measures be ...differentiable.
We show how classic source-decomposition and subgroup-decomposition methods can be reconciled with regression methodology used in the recent literature. We also highlight some pitfalls that arise ...from uncritical use of the regression approach. The LIS database is used to compare the approaches using an analysis of the changing contributions to inequality in the United States and Finland.
When forming their preferences about the distribution of income, rational people may be caught between two opposite forms of "tyranny." Giving absolute priority to the worst-off imposes a sort of ...tyranny on the rest of the population, but giving less than absolute priority imposes a reverse form of tyranny where the worstoff may be sacrificed for the sake of small benefits to many well-off individuals. We formally show that this intriguing dilemma is more severe than previously recognised, and we examine how people negotiate such conflicts with a questionnaire-experimental study. Our study shows that both tyrannies are rejected by a majority of the participants, which makes it problematic for them to define consistent distributive preferences on the distribution.
Goodness of Fit: An Axiomatic Approach Cowell, Frank A.; Davidson, Russell; Flachaire, Emmanuel
Journal of business & economic statistics,
01/2015, Letnik:
33, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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An axiomatic approach is used to develop a one-parameter family of measures of divergence between distributions. These measures can be used to perform goodness-of-fit tests with good statistical ...properties. Asymptotic theory shows that the test statistics have well-defined limiting distributions which are, however, analytically intractable. A parametric bootstrap procedure is proposed for implementation of the tests. The procedure is shown to work very well in a set of simulation experiments, and to compare favorably with other commonly used goodness-of-fit tests. By varying the parameter of the statistic, one can obtain information on how the distribution that generated a sample diverges from the target family of distributions when the true distribution does not belong to that family. An empirical application analyzes a U.K. income dataset.
Covers a range of topics in the field of income distribution and extends the approach to related issues such as mobility and attitudes to risk. This selection of papers includes both participatory ...experiments and questionnaire experiments.
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