Search

We investigate the association between adult health and the income inequality they experienced as children up to 80 years earlier. Our inequality data track shares of national income held by top percentiles from 1913 to 2009. We average those data over the same early-life years and merge them to individual data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data for 1984-2009. Controlling for demographic and economic factors, we find both men and women are statistically more likely to report poorer health if income was more unequally distributed during the first years of their lives. The association is robust to alternative specifications of income inequality and time trends and remains significant even when we control for differences in overall childhood health. Our results constitute prima facie evidence that adults' health may be adversely affected by the income inequality they experienced as children., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Objective: Our objective was to show how a woman's economic well-being changes in the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and Canada after her husband's death and the importance of public and private income sources in offsetting the economic consequences of that death., Methods: With data from the Cross-National Equivalent File, we used event history analysis to track changes in the social security replacement rate and the more comprehensive total income replacement rate for women and to show how these changes vary across age and household income quintiles within and across countries., Results: There were substantial differences across the countries in how income from specific sources changes, especially with respect to the mix of income from government and private sources, but the overall across-country pattern of total income replacement rates was remarkably similar both in size and in distribution across age and the woman's place in the income distribution prior to her husband's death., Discussion: Studies that focus on a social security replacement rate will seriously understate the actual total income replacement rate of women following a husband's death. This will especially be the case in countries like the United States where private sources of income play a more important role in income replacement.

The article introduces the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) and the survey within it: the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA). The panel data that was acquired through the HILDA survey is one of many that is used to understand and track the economic well being of a country, in this case Australia. In the article, the creation, details and release of the CNEF and HILDA data are discussed. The author makes it clear that Australia can now compete on the world stage with nations using similar surveys as frames of reference.