New Series

Volume 18, Number 3-4 (September-December 2009)

The Journal of Income Distribution, Volume 18, Number 3-4 (September-December 2009) is now out.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Income Distribution is the outgrowth of the conference Income Distribution and the Family, which took place from September 1-3, 2008, in Kiel, Germany, kindly sponsored by the Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Innovationsfonds Schleswig-Holstein. The gathering was an attempt to bring together researchers who work in the field of Family Economics, in order to break the pattern of the dismissal of within-family behavior by mainstream economic thinking.

Economists continue to try to understand the incentives behind market behavior driven by the pursuit of material comfort. Economics has in fact been distinguished from other fields of the Social Sciences due to its tendency to build and follow certain strong abstractions. Economists do so in order to launch powerful principles that may lead to “one theory for many things”, as opposed to holding to “a different theory for each thing”. Within their abstractions lies the tendency to ignore household size, household composition, the role of children, fertility, the intra-household distribution of resources (including over time), and many other aspects of the family, in understanding economic trends and development.

The Kiel conference provided an excellent forum for theoretical, empirical, policy-oriented, and methodological studies, on how insights from family economics may enhance our knowledge concerning the measurement, driving forces, and evolution of economic inequality. The response to the call for papers was enthusiastic, leading to more than 120 paper submissions, out of which 54 papers were selected for presentation, in addition to 6 invited keynote talks by Gary Burtless (Brookings Institution), Matthias Doepke (Northwestern University), Jeremy Greenwood (University of Pennsylvania), Krishna Pendakur (Simon Fraser University), Ray Rees (University of Munich), and Michèle Tertilt (Stanford University).

Related to household types and the assessment of overall inequality, Monti and Santoro use a new measure for examining between-groups inequality. They apply their method using Italian data studying stratification among Italian household types. The contribution by Belloc is related to household size (formation and dissolution), as it empirically studies the income-related determinants of the decision of young Italians to leave their parents’ home, identifying a strong parental income effect.

The next topic covered in this issue is intergenerational mobility, particularly the role of family in offering opportunities for the young. Hussain, Munk, and Bonke offer a methodological comparison of intergenerational earnings mobility using databases of fathers and sons. Related is the study by Eberharter who examines the role of family background in determining labor-supply decisions, occupational segregation, and intergenerational income mobility. Accordingly, Magnani and Rammohan offer a new factor that may explain the bias in female labor supply: the bias in females having the role of offering help to elderly in the household, using Indonesian data. Related to labor supply policies, Müller and Steiner examine the role of minimum wage in Germany.

The focus of this Special Issue shifts then to poverty and especially child poverty, starting with the article by Maurizio, Perrot and Villafañe who stress the factors behind incidences of poverty reduction in Argentina. They find that improvements in the labor-market are the most important factor explaining exit from poverty, but families with children and female-headed households face higher difficulty in exiting poverty. Alaba and Koch examine the effectiveness of the public health system in South Africa regarding the reduction in health inequality among children. Roelen and Gassmann examine child poverty in Vietnam, and offers the additional insight of the urban/rural divide regarding the possibility of child poverty. In particular, the authors find that children in rural areas in Vietnam are more likely to be trapped in poverty.

The current Special Issue of the Journal of Income Distribution thus offers theoretical, but mostly empirical contributions, touching most facets of the link-up between the family and income distribution. May the readers of this volume have the opportunity to learn and be inspired to further research in this area.