Time poverty is a key yet conceptually contested dimension of household living standards. Both univariate and bivariate measures remain debated because there is no clear consensus on how to define and quantify socially necessary unpaid work, the time that money cannot substitute for, across...

We study how individuals' views on current and future levels of income inequality change during periods of expansionary fiscal policy. In a randomized controlled trial (RCT), we provide information on fiscal expansion to a representative sample of the German population. Our findings reveal that...

Understanding poverty and well-being requires moving beyond income-based measures to account for how work and time are organized within households. While income and unpaid work sustain household living standards, in combination with leisure they determine how these standards are produced and...

In this paper, we present the empirical methodology used to estimate the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) for the United States over the period 2007-2022. We provide a step-by-step account of the statistical matching procedure employed to construct a synthetic dataset...

We exploit cross-sectional variation in the response of US states to a monetary policy shock to study how the impact of monetary policy varies with the share of married women who work. We find that the economy's response is more muted the lower the share of married women employed before the...

The risk of a worker falling into unemployment represents one of the most important threats to the stability of households' finances - both in terms of lower spending (and hence living standards) and in terms of a greater degree of financial distress (such as the accumulation of unmanageable...

This paper discusses the key concepts and main stylized facts concerning household real income and income inequality in the United States in recent decades. It explains the widely used summary measures of income distribution, which reveal that income inequality in the US has been steadily...

The effects of poverty in childhood can last a lifetime. Research shows that children living in poverty have lower levels of health and wellbeing, attain lower levels of education, have lower levels of occupational attainment and are more likely to be poor in adulthood. In this report, we focus...

Using household survey data on expenditures and incomes, we construct an objective measure of corruption in the public sector for a broad spectrum of countries. Specifically, we focus on the consumption-income gap for public sector workers relative to private sector workers to gauge the extent...

Obtaining comparable poverty estimates over time is critical for monitoring poverty trends and informing effective poverty reduction policies. Yet hardly any developing countries could construct consistent poverty trends over extended time periods due to changes to the consumption survey...

Subjective wellbeing is the term used to describe an individual's satisfaction with their life and standard of living. The research in this area is challenging because it is a subjective expression of the respondent's feelings, and individuals may have different ideas or preferences. On the...

Analyses of income distributions across households crucially depend on equivalence scales. They define income increments necessary to keep a household's living standard constant as it is joined by additional adults or children. Such scales have frequently been estimated using income satisfaction...

This paper examines the welfare effects of Tanzania's 2021 levy on mobile money transfers, a policy that sharply increased transaction costs in a country where mobile money is the primary channel for financial access and remittances. Using two waves of the Tanzania National Panel Survey (2014/15...

We add to the debate about whether models of earnings dynamics should allow for unobservable heterogeneity in expected earnings growth rates by examining implications for a statistic originally proposed to estimate the variance of persistent earnings shocks. While that statistic is unbiased...

We re-assess the consequences of a NIT for two-parent families, utilizing hitherto untapped data. The Gary and Seattle experiments fail balancing tests. In New Jersey, Denver and Manitoba we estimate far greater labor supply responses than the current consensus, with remarkable consistency in...