The purpose of this paper is to describe the effect of self-employment income on the distribution of market income among households in nineteen nations. Many of the nations are high-income OECD countries, but we also include several countries with lower levels of income per capita, including...

This paper investigates the relationship between educational attainment and earnings inequality in eight nations using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database. Although the results should be considered exploratory rather than definitive until verified and qualified by more detailed...

This paper explores differences in economic well-being across cohorts of the population in four modern nations (Canada, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States). It focuses on relative incomes within countries, poverty rates and social expenditures by age group over the 1974 to 1994 period....

This paper presents stylized facts about the effect of children on household disposable income and its components (the 'income package') in nine OECD countries, employing data from the Luxembourg Income Study database. We find that cross-national differences in the impact of children on...

High correlations between risks can increase required insurer capital and/orreduce the availability of insurance. For such insurance lines, securitizationis rapidly emerging as an alternative form of risk transfer. The ultimatesuccess of securitization in replacing or complementing traditional...

We examine asset prices in a representative-agent model of general equilibrium. Assuming only that individuals are risk averse, we determine conditions on the changes in asset risk that are both necessary and sufficient for the asset price to fall. We show that these conditions neither imply,...

We consider a competitive insurance market with adverse selection. Unlike the standard models, we assume that individuals receive the benefit of some type of potential government assistance that guarantees them a minimum level of wealth. For example, this assistance might be some type of...

Decisions under risk are often multidimensional, where the preferences of the decision maker depend on several attributes. For example, an individual might be concerned about both her level of wealth and the condition of her health. Many times the signs of successive cross derivatives of a...

How does risk affect saving? Empirical work typically examines the effects of detectible differences in risk within the data. How these differences affect saving in theoretical models depends on the metric one uses for risk. For labor-income risk, second-degree increases in risk require prudence...

Consider a simple two-state risk with equal probabilities for the two states. In particular, assume that the random wealth variable Xi dominates Yi via ith-order stochastic dominance for i = M,N. We show that the 50-50 lottery [XN + YM, YN + XM] dominates the lottery [XN + XM, YN + YM] via (N +...