Abstract-Using administrative panel data on the entire population of new labor immigrants to the Netherlands, we estimate the effects of individual labor market spells on immigration durations using the timing-of-events method. The model allows for correlated unobserved heterogeneity across migration, unemployment, and employment processes. We find that unemployment spells increase return probabilities for all immigrant groups, while reemployment spells typically delay returns.

We analyse why child poverty rates were much higher in Britain than in Western Germany during the 1990s, using a framework that focuses on poverty transition rates. Child poverty exit rates were significantly lower, and poverty entry rates significantly higher, in Britain. We decompose these cross-national differences into differences in the prevalence of 'trigger events' (changes from one year to the next in household composition, household labour market attachment, and labour earnings), and differences in the chances of making a poverty transition conditional on experiencing a trigger event. It is the latter which are most important in accounting for the cross-national differences in poverty exit and entry rates.1

Mobility indices are popular tools designed to quantify the extent of income changes by aggregating “local” distributional change into a “global” scalar according to some rule. For some mobility measures, this aggregation rule is only implicit in their standard definition. We derive an insightful approximation to the (statistical) aggregation rule for the important class of mobility indices introduced by Shorrocks (Journal of Economic Theory 19 (1978), 376–93) and further generalized by Maasoumi and Zandvakili (Economic Letters 22 (1986), 97–102), which enables us to characterize their normative properties. We also develop methods for estimation and inference. A substantive empirical contribution emerges from the comparison of mobility between the United States and Germany. Our methods reveal why income mobility is higher in Germany than in the United States: Higher German mobility in the bottom of the distribution is combined with an implicitly higher weighting by the mobility index at the bottom.

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The approximate effects of measurement error on a variety of measures of inequality and poverty are derived. They are shown to depend on the measurement error variance and functionals of the errorcontaminated income distribution, but not on the form of the measurement error distribution, and to be accurate within a rich class of error-free income distributions and measurement error distributions. The functionals of the error-contaminated income distribution that approximate the measurement error induced distortions can be estimated. So it is possible to investigate the sensitivity of welfare measures to alternative amounts of measurement error and, when an estimate of the measurement error variance is available, to calculate corrected welfare measures. The methods are illustrated in an application using Indonesian household expenditure data.