Suchergebnisse

To what extent do rising income levels explain the decline in adult mortality rates experienced in the United States a century ago? I explore this question by investigating the income effect of the country's first wide-scale entitlement program: the Union Army pensions. Documenting that Republican Congressional candidates boosted pensions to secure votes, I exploit exogenous increases in income stemming from patronage politics to estimate the semi-elasticity of disease onset with respect to pensions. Income effects are large for cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and respiratory illnesses.

The three chapters in Part III report synthesis is findings from the microlevel IFPRI research in The Gambia, Guatemala, Kenya, the Philippines, and Rwanda, as well as from the other case studies presented in Part V. Any attempt to synthesize and generalize on the basis of the detailed case studies runs the risk of excessively extrapolating from special circumstances and of losing insights gained from these case studies, whose strengths are the detailed~assessments of the commercialization-production-income-consumption-nutrition chain and the important feedbacks from these elements. This chapter, on the first elements of the commercialization chain, is therefore to be seen in the context of the following two chapters, and all the three synthesis chapters together are to be seen in the context of the rich insights from the individual studies discussed later. ; PR ; IFPRI1; Globalization, Market and Trade Policy; nobio ; DGO

We present a model of income tax avoidance with heterogeneous agents, assuming the presence of a comparison income effect and of a psychic cost (disutility) of tax dodging. We analyse the policy preferences of the agents, and identify a median-voter political equilibrium. Paralleling previous results in the optimal taxation literature, we show that the comparison income effect calls for a high degree of progressivity of the income tax; additionally, we find that this tendence is strengthened by the psychic cost of avoidance. We then model the endogenous formation of the stigma attached to the act of avoidance as a conformism game. We argue that such stigma is motivated by the desire to make redistribution more effective, and that it is enhanced by the income comparison effect.