Economics and Information Theory

The analysis of inequality is placed in the context of recent developments in economics and statistics.

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Measurement of inequality

Over the past decade, the Peruvian government has issued property titles to over 1.2 million urban households, the largest government titling program targeted to urban squatters in the developing world. This paper examines the labor market effects of increases in tenure security resulting from the program. In particular, I study the direct impact of securing a property title on hours of work, substitution of home for market work and substitution of adult for child labor. To isolate the causal role of ownership security I make use of differences across regions induced by the timing of the program and differences across target populations in the level of pre-program tenure security. My estimates suggest that titling results in a substantial increase in labor hours, a shift in labor supply away from work at home to work in the outside market and substitution of adult for child labor. For the average squatter family, granting of a property title is associated with a 17% increase in total household work hours, a 47% decrease in the probability of working inside the home, and a 28% reduction in the probability of child labor.

Entitled to Work: Urban Property Rights and Labor Supply in Peru

Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff

Consideration of world inequality should cause reexamination of the key concepts underlying the welfare approach to measuring income inequality and its relation to measuring poverty. This reexamination leads to exploration of a new measure that allows poverty and inequality to be considered in the same framework, incorporates different approaches to measuring inequality, and allows varied expressions of the cost of inequality. Applied to the world distribution of income for 1820–1992, the new measure provides different perspectives on the evolution of global inequality.

/pdf/on-analyzing-the-world-distribution-of-income-3z4i2wzxah.pdf

On Analyzing the World Distribution of Income

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of imperfectly categorizing risks in the insurance industry under conditions of asymmetric information. Firms, initially unable to distinguish the risk type of individuals, are provided with imperfect information concerning risk membership. The paper then compares various Wilson-type equilibria to determine the welfare implications of firms imperfectly categorizing risks. It is shown that only in the case where the initial equilibrium is of the Nash no-subsidy type is there a Pareto-type improvement in welfare.

Categorizing Risks in the Insurance Industry

More females than males have been attending Canadian universities over the past decade and this gender imbalance in university participation has been increasing. We use the Linear Probability and Logit models to investigate the determinants of attending university and explore the reasons for the increasing gender imbalance. We find that, in gender-specific equations, the values of the coefficients attached to variables and the values of the variables themselves are both important in explaining the rising level of the university participation rate for women and men. The important variables include a time trend to capture the evolving societal norms, the dynamic influence of parental education, the earnings premium for a university degree, tuition fees and real income. The increasing gap between the female and male participation rates (15 percentage points by 2005) can be accounted for equally by differences in the coefficients in female and male participation equations and the widening gap in the university premium for women and men.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/30541/1/610748394.pdf

The gender imbalance in participation in Canadian universities (1977-2005)

We use data from the Surveys of Consumer Finance (1975-1993) to examine how postsecondary education participation rates have evolved over time and how certain variables may affect them. A number of socio- economic influences are shown to affect participation rates. Beyond these, particularly pronounced trend increases in postsecondary education attendance for children from low-income households have led to a con- vergence in the participation rates of children from different income groups and a consequent reduction in the regressivity associated with subsidies for postsecondary education. We consider possible reasons for this convergence. Conditioning on a number of other variables, we are particularly interested in the possibility that increases in family real income may have affected the demand for postsecondary education by children from low-income families more than the demand by children from high-income households. We find that, although income does have a statistically significant non-linear influence which can explain much of the cross-sectional difference in attendance at postsecondary institutions, its quantitative effects are not sufficiently strong to account for the con- vergence over time in participation by children from different family income groups.

/pdf/family-income-and-postsecondary-education-in-canada-4v5q27o2cn.pdf

Family Income and Postsecondary Education In Canada

/pdf/making-inequality-comparisons-when-lorenz-curves-intersect-5cv8vu6y74.pdf

Making Inequality Comparisons When Lorenz Curves Intersect

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/24072.pdf

Michael Hoy

Papers

Categorizing Risks in the Insurance Industry

The gender imbalance in participation in Canadian universities (1977-2005)

Family Income and Postsecondary Education In Canada

Making Inequality Comparisons When Lorenz Curves Intersect

The value of genetic information in the life insurance market