Individual Income (individual + income)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Meeting the Need for Personal Care among the Elderly: Does Medicaid Home Care Spending Matter?

HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH, Issue 1p2 2008
Peter Kemper
Objective. To determine whether Medicaid home care spending reduces the proportion of the disabled elderly population who do not get help with personal care. Data Sources. Data on Medicaid home care spending per poor elderly person in each state is merged with data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey for 1992, 1996, and 2000. The sample (n=6,067) includes elderly persons living in the community who have at least one limitation in activities of daily living (ADLs). Study Design. Using a repeated cross-section analysis, the probability of not getting help with an ADL is estimated as a function of Medicaid home care spending, individual income, interactions between income and spending, and a set of individual characteristics. Because Medicaid home care spending is targeted at the low-income population, it is not expected to affect the population with higher incomes. We exploit this difference by using higher-income groups as comparison groups to assess whether unobserved state characteristics bias the estimates. Principal Findings. Among the low-income disabled elderly, the probability of not receiving help with an ADL limitation is about 10 percentage points lower in states in the top quartile of per capita Medicaid home care spending than in other states. No such association is observed in higher-income groups. These results are robust to a set of sensitivity analyses of the methods. Conclusion. These findings should reassure state and federal policymakers considering expanding Medicaid home care programs that they do deliver services to low-income people with long-term care needs and reduce the percent of those who are not getting help. [source]


What Do You Know, Who Do You Know?: School as a Site for the Production of Social Capital and its Effects on Income Attainment in Poland and the Czech Republic

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2002
Karen Buerkle
This paper criticizes traditional approaches to stratification, which suggest that education contributes to inequality solely by endowing people with different amounts of human capital (knowledge and skills) or credentials. What these approaches overlook is the social component of education,friends, acquaintances and other connections one accumulates while in school. These connections reduce the uncertainty inherently present in the hiring process by compensating for lack of information with trust. We argue that social capital gained while in school has an independent effect on individual income, and show how this effect varies by education and experience levels. Conceptualizing schooling as an important source of social capital and finding ways to disentangle the effects of human and social capital on individual income are a contribution that economic sociologists can make to the study of education and inequality. [source]


Income Distribution, Price Elasticity and the ,Robinson Effect'

THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL, Issue 5 2004
Corrado Benassi
In The Economics of Imperfect Competition, Joan Robinson argued that an increase of the consumers' incomes should make demand less elastic,which, although reasonable about individual demand as an assumption on preferences, suggests a role for income distribution as far as market demand is concerned. We use Esteban's (International Economic Review, Vol. 27 (1986), No. 2, pp. 439,444) income share elasticity to provide sufficient conditions on income distribution that support the ,Robinson effect',i.e. such that a negative (positive) relationship between individual income and price elasticity translates into a negative (positive) relationship between mean income and market demand elasticity. The paper also provides a framework to study the effects of distributive shocks on the price elasticity of market demand. [source]


On the Popular Support for Progressive Taxation

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 4 2003
Esteban F. Klor
The "popular support for progressive taxation theorem" (Marhuenda and Ortuño-Ortín, 1995) provides an important formalization of the intuition that a majority of relatively poor voters over rich ones leads to progressive income taxation. Yet the theorem does not provide an equilibrium outcome. In addition, it assumes an overly restrictive domain of tax schedules and no incentive effects of income taxation. This paper shows that none of these assumptions of the theorem can be relaxed completely. Most notably, it is shown that a majority of poor voters does not imply progressive taxation in a more general policy space and that a regressive tax schedule may obtain a majority over a progressive one when individuals' income is endogenous. [source]