In the wake of China’s enormous success transitioning to a market economy there is a widely held belief among researchers and policymakers that the country’s income distribution has become excessively unfair. Previous authors have argued ‘the perception of inequality is one of the key...

We estimate subjective equivalence scales for the whole Euro Zone as well as its individual constituent countries using the European Income and Living Conditions (SILC) data. Importantly, by using minimum needs income question our approach does not require the specification of a complete social...

While the idea behind subjective equivalence scales is generally attractive, subjective scales have been plagued by problems of inconsistency. We address this problem with new European Income and Living Conditions (SILC) datasets that are much larger in size than those available to previous...

Superseded by Working Paper 15-04. We estimate a structural model of optimal life-cycle housing and consumption in the presence of realistic labor income and house price uncertainties. The model postulates constant elasticity of substitution between housing service and nonhousing consumption,...

We estimate a structural model of optimal life-cycle housing and nonhousing con- sumption in the presence of labor income and house price uncertainties. The model postulates constant elasticity of substitution between housing service and nonhousing consumption, and explicitly incorporates a...

understanding of housing market developments on general activities. We use the estimated model to conduct policy experiments and find that consumption responds nonlinearly to changes in housing wealth with an average marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth of about 5 percent.