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Este estudio hace una estimación de la característica distribucional de los bienes en el caso de México, y utiliza la teoría de los impuestos óptimos o de Ramsey para hacer la interpretación de los resultados. Esta característica distribucional se toma como la covarianza entre el consumo del bien privado de las familias de diferentes ingresos y la valuación de las mismas por la sociedad. Para estimar la valuación social se utiliza la función de bienestar de Atkinson, y para hacer el análisis empírico aplicado al caso de México se recurre a la Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH) del año 2000. Asimismo, Se ordenan los bienes de acuerdo con el valor de la característica distribucional y se hace un análisis de sensibilidad considerando el grado de aversión social a la desigualdad.

Mediante la aplicación de un modelo económico de ciclo de vida se analizan los cambios en la participación en el mercado de trabajo de las mujeres casadas ocurridos entre 1976 y 1996 en el Área Metropolitana de Monterrey. Se pone especial interés en el análisis del efecto de la crisis económica sobre dicha participación y se encuentra que el efecto neto de la crisis es el decremento la participación de las esposas. Además se percibe que la participación de éstas ha aumentado debido a factores asociados con el cambio de actitudes frente al mercado de trabajo, la edad, el mayor efecto de la educación y la disminución en el número de hijos. Factores como la caída en los ingresos familiares y el desempleo de los esposos parecen más débiles.

Understanding the factors affecting child labor and school attendance are primordial to developing policies aimed at improving the lives of children. Policies are needed as poor households can sub-invest in human capital. Factors have individually shown to affect child labor and school attendance, but we question which factors cause the strongest effects by considering them simultaneously. We evaluate which factors have led to the decrease in child labor and the increase in school attendance of children aged 12-14 in Mexico. We consider income, the education of the head-of-household, monetary government transfers, access to public health institutions, remittances and demographic characteristics, as possible sources of the changes. We use a variant of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition (Fairlie, 2005), which allows the decomposition in the case the variables to be explained are dichotomous. The change in child labor and school attendance over time can then be decomposed into an explained and an unexplained portion, with each factor contributing a specific amount to the explained portion of the difference. The most important factor that led to the fall child labor and the increase in school attendance was the improvement in the human capital of parents, measured as years of education. The increase in government assistance and greater access to social health insurance also play an important role. Public policies aimed at increasing school attendance and those aimed at reducing child labor should consider the improvement of education as a major goal.

This article studies the relation between crime and inequality and between crime and poverty in Mexico using reported crime data from 1963 municipalities from the years 2000 and 2005. It uses two measures of crime, property and violent crime, and two measures of inequality, one for income and one for education; it also distinguishes between the concepts of mean income and poverty (marginality). The results show a positive relation between crime and inequality and poverty in cross section regressions. When we control for heterogeneity, the relation between violent crime and poverty is lost and the regressions lose much of their explanatory power. This means that although there is a strong relation between crime and variables such as inequality, poverty, migration and others, once a higher level of crime is reached, perhaps governments cannot use these variables to decrease it