CEMFI

About: CEMFI is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Unemployment & Estimator. The organization has 71 authors who have published 499 publications receiving 46553 citations. The organization is also known as: Center for Monetary and Financial Studies.

Spain is Different: Falling Trends of Inequality

Abstract: In this article we characterize the evolution of inequality in hourly wages, hours of work, labor earnings, household disposable income and household consumption for Spain between 1985 and 2000. We look at both the Encuesta Continua de Presupuestos Familiares and the European Household Community Panel. Our analysis shows that inequality in individual net labor earnings and household net disposable income has decreased substantially. The decreases in the tertiary education premium and in the unemployment rate have been key ingredients to understand this falling trend. However, the inequality reduction has not been monotonic over the period: while it fell in years of economic expansion, there was an inequality surge in the recession of the early nineties. Public transfers have played a crucial role in smoothing out the inequality arising in the labor market, but instead the Spanish family does not seem to have been an important insurance mechanism. Regarding household consumption, inequality has fallen much less than inequality in household net disposable income, with the decrease mostly concentrated in the second half of the eighties. This suggests that the reduction in income inequality has affected the sources of permanent differences between households only during the second half of the eighties. Our estimates of the earnings process for the period are consistent with this view.

Youth Emancipation and Perceived Job Insecurity of Parents and Children

Abstract: The age at which children leave the parental home differs considerably across countries. In this paper we argue that lower job insecurity of parents and higher job insecurity of children delay emancipation. We provide aggregate evidence which supports this hypothesis for 12 European countries and which helps account for the increase in coresidence in the 1990s. We also give microeconometric evidence for Italy, a country for which we have access to household-specific information on job security of fathers and coresidence. In the late 1990s, approximately 75% of young Italians aged 18 to 35 were living at home and they had only a 4% probability of emancipation in the 3 subsequent years. We show that this probability would have increased by 4 to 10 percentage points if their fathers had gone from perceiving to have a fully secure job to expecting to be unemployed for sure.

Income Insecurity and Youth Emancipation: A Theoretical Approach

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a theoretical model to study the effect of income insecurity of parents and offspring on the child's residential choice. Parents are partially altruistic toward their children and will provide financial help to an independent child when her income is low relative to the parents'. We find that children of more altruistic parents are more likely to become independent. However, first-order stochastic dominance (FOSD) shifts in the distribution of the child's future income (or her parents') have ambiguous effects on the child's residential choice. Parental altruism is the very source of ambiguity in the results. If parents are selfish or the joint income distribution of parents and child places no mass on the region where transfers are provided, a FOSD shift in the distribution of the child's (parents') future income will reduce (raise) the child's current income threshold for independence.

Polarization and the Middle Class

Abstract: There is an increasing literature that discusses how to measure the middle class. Some approaches are based on an arbitrary definition such as income quartiles or the poverty line. Recently, Foster and Wolfson developed a methodology which lacks of arbitrariness that enables us to compare the middle class of two different income distributions. We apply this new tool jointly with a complementary method - relative distribution approach - to household income data in 1994-2004 and 2004-2010, to analyze the evolution of the middle class and polarization in Uruguay. During the Orst period, which is characterized by an increasing income inequality, we find that the middle class declined and income polarization increased. In the second one, where the Uruguayan economy experienced a recovery from the downturn suffered in 2002, we find that the middle class rose and polarization decreased. However, this last result is attenuated when we do not consider the household income imputation because of the new health system implemented in 2008.