"Savings of Entrepreneurs"

Previous work on entrepreneurship and wealth has documented that entrepreneurial households are wealthier and have higher wealth mobility. However, the literature has not paid attention to the components of wealth change. Furthermore, endogeneity problems in the measurement of the interaction between saving rates and entrepreneurship are not well addressed. In this paper, by reexamining the relationship between entrepreneurship and household wealth more rigorously, I show that while entrepreneurial households save more out of their income, it is not true that they experience higher rates of wealth increase or capital gains. In my analyses, I control for the endogeneity between the decision to start a business and household savings. I find some evidence that the decision to become a business owner is endogenous to the rate of capital gains and to the rate of saving (out of income). My results also show that households do not save more in order to start a business. Therefore, the evidence suggests that business owners save more, but not that those who save more become business owners.

"Financial Liberalization and Poverty: Channels of Influence"

Financial development and its effects on the economic development of a country has recently been one of the most prolific areas of research in the fields of development, finance, and international economics. So far, however, very little work has been done to analyze comprehensively the relationship between financial liberalization and poverty. There is still controversy about the exact role and the effectiveness of financial liberalization on improving economic conditions in developing countries. This paper aims to contribute to this debate by critically reviewing the relevant literature and looking closely at the channels through which financial liberalization can affect poverty.

"Asset Poverty in The United States: Its Persistence in an Expansionary Economy"

From this paper's Preface, by Dr. Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, President: Economic growth and a rising stock market in the 1990s gave the impression that everyone was accumulating wealth and asset poverty rates were declining. The impression was supported by the official, income-based poverty measure, which exhibited a sharp decline. According to Senior Scholar Edward N. Wolff and Research Scholar Asena Caner, poverty measures should include wealth as well as income. Their study of asset poverty in the United States between 1984 and 1999 focuses on the lower end of the wealth distribution and shows that asset poverty rates did not decline during the period studied, and that the severity of poverty increased. It also shows that asset poverty is much more persistent than income poverty.

"Household Wealth, Public Consumption and Economic Well-Being in the United States"

Standard official measures of economic well-being are based on money income. The general consensus is that such measures are seriously flawed because they ignore several crucial determinants of well-being. We examine two such determinants--household wealth and public consumption--in the context of the United States. Our findings suggest that the level and distribution of economic well-being is substantially altered when money income is adjusted for wealth or public consumption.

"Occupational and Industrial Mobility in the United States 1969–93"

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we investigate occupational and industrial mobility of individuals over the 1969–80 and 1981–93 periods in the United States. We find that workers changed both occupations and industries more frequently in the later period. For example, occupational mobility for men ranged from 15 to 20 percent per year during the first period and from 20 to 25 percent per year over the second. We also find that, for men, occupational and industrial changes are associated with lower earnings, though this effect has lessened somewhat over time, while for women the results are mixed. Our results also indicate that older and less educated workers are less likely to shift occupation or industry, as are better paid men but not better paid women.

Relative deprivation and its association with health indicators: Lower inequality may not improve health

This study tested the hypothesis of relative deprivation (RD) to investigate how inequality is associated with health and health related behaviors in a developing country context. Data from two nationally representative surveys in 2010, 2012, and 2014 were used to estimate logit and ordered logit models stratified by sex. RD was calculated based on both income and education, unlike most studies in the earlier literature that relied only on income. All results of the study were found to be robust to alternative reference groups. First, consistent with the earlier literature, RD was found to be positively correlated with indicators of poor health. Secondly, and more interestingly, unlike the results in the earlier RD literature, women with more income or education (and lower RD) were found to be more likely to be current smokers and more likely to consume a higher number of cigarettes. The main policy implication is that reducing inequality can help improve self-rated health indicators, but it will not be sufficient to achieve health policy goals. Unless smoking patterns change, reducing inequalities in income or education among women will not necessarily lead to better health; because smoking is more common among better educated and richer women.

An economic analysis of tobacco control policies in Turkey

To evaluate the costs and benefits of various anti-smoking policy alternatives including taxation and four cessation programs, accounting for the demographic projections in 2011-2050 in Turkey. Demographic projections are combined with incidence and mortality rates of four major cigarette related diseases, price elasticity of cigarette demand and unit costs of nonprice measures to reduce demand in order to estimate the net present discounted values of policy alternatives. Among policy alternatives that yield the same amount of cigarette consumption, cessation programs yield lower costs to households and the society at large than taxation, while taxation is preferred by the public sector. Net benefit to the public sector as a function of the tax rate is a single-peaked Laffer curve. The public sector can obtain the highest net benefit if it raises the special consumption tax rate from its current level by nearly 9 percentage points. Although intervention programs emerge as the preferred anti-smoking alternatives, more research is needed on estimating the cost-effectiveness and social desirability of taxation and intervention programs in Turkey.