This paper compares income inequality and income mobility in the Scandinavian countries and the United States during the 1980's. The results demonstrate that inequality is greater in the United States than in the Scandinavian countries and that the ranking of countries with respect to inequality remains unchanged when the accounting period of income is extended from one to 11 years. The pattern of mobility turns out to be remarkably similar despite major differences in labor market and social policies between the Scandinavian countries and the United States.Keywords: Income inequality, income mobility. JEL classification: D31Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank the discussant Stephen P Jenkins for helpful comments. We also thank Stephen E. Rhody and seminar pa rticipants at the University of Michigan and the University of Western Ontario.

This paper analyzes the potential demand for alternative fuel vehicles. The alternative fuel vehicles we consider are liquid propane gas and electric powered vehicles in addition to a dual-fuel vehicle. The data were obtained from a stated preference survey in which each respondent, in a randomly selected sample, was exposed to 15 experiments. In each experiment the respondents were asked to rank three hypothetical vehicles characterized by specific attributes, according to the respondents' preferences. Several versions of a random utility model are formulated and estimated. They include a model for rank ordered data, and models that allow for different types of correlation in preferences across experiments. Apart from one case the model specifications are estimated from the data on first choices. The most general model turns out to predict aggregate second and third choices rather well. The model is applied to assess the willingness to pay for alternative fuel vehicles.

Abstract:We analyse how inequality of disposable income evolved in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden during the late 1980s and early 1990s when unemployment rose dramatically in all four countries. We find that a standard measure of inequality -the Gini coefficient -was surprisingly stable in all countries over this period. By decomposing the Gini coefficient into a number of income components, we can test hypotheses about the reasons for the stable income distribution. Our most straightforward hypothesis, that rising unemployment benefits have counteracted the impact of more unequally distributed earnings, gets only limited support. More complex mechanisms seems to have been at work in the Nordic countries.

Abstract:Housing markets tend to display both positive serial correlation as well as a considerable volatility over time. We present a stochastic model illustrating the connection between adaptive expectations and market fluctuations. All macro economic and demographic variables stay fixed over time and price movements are driven by expectations only. In the case where agents face unconstrained mortgage financing, the housing market oscillations are regular and depend on mortgage to income ratios. When credit institutions are introduced, which view houses as mortgage collaterals, the dynamics get complex. Periods of mild oscillations are mixed with violent collapses in an unpredictable manner.

During the last two decades, the discrete choice modeling of labor supply decisions has become increasingly popular. Within the literature adopting this approach, however, there are two potentially important issues that so far have not been given the attention they might deserve. A first issue concerns the procedure by which the discrete alternatives are selected to enter the choice set. Most authors choose (not probabilistically) a set of fixed points identical for every individual. Some authors adopt instead a sampling procedure and also assume that the choice set may differ across households. A second issue concerns the availability of the alternatives. Most authors assume all the values of hours of work within some range are equally available. At the other extreme, some authors assume only two or three alternatives (for example, nonparticipation, part-time and full-time) are available for everyone. Some studies account instead for the fact that not all the hour opportunities are equally available to everyone specifying a probability density function of opportunities for each individual. In this paper we explore by simulation the implications of (i) the procedure used to build the choice set (fixed alternatives versus sampled alternatives); (ii) accounting or not accounting for a different availability of alternatives. The results of the evaluation performed in this paper show that the way the choice set is represented has little impact on the fitting of observed values, but a more significant and important impact on the out-of-sample prediction performance. Thus, the treatment of the choice sets might have a crucial effect on the result of policy evaluations.