Using the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, this article investigates how Russian households' consumption responds to income shocks and, in particular, how household wealth and human capital affect the households' ability to smooth consumption. An instrumental variable estimation method...

In this article we analyze trends in income inequality and the distribution of income in rural China from 1987 to 1999. We find an uneven but long-run increase in inequality in rural China and show that nearly half of the rural population was not much better off in 1999 than at the start of the...