International Comparisons in Economic Well-Being among Advanced Industrialized Countries

The purpose of the workshop is to discuss the work on the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) for four countries: Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Participants will present the estimates for individual countries; provide bilateral comparisons between the United States and each of the other countries; discuss the role of government expenditures and taxation as well as wealth in shaping the level and distribution of economic well-being; provide a technical overview of the quality of the statistical matching technique used in creating the core synthetic microdata files; and plan for the dissemination of the methodology and results from the project.

(As of November 23, 2010)

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Friday, December 3, 2010

For Ronald Schettkat and Daniel Wiens’ report on applying the LIMEW to Germany, click here.

Participants

Selcuk Eren

Selcuk Eren is a research scholar in the Distribution of Income and Wealth program specializing in demographic economics and labor economics. His current research interests include the internal and international migration of labor, income and educational mobility in developing countries, and the measure of households’ housing wealth, among other topics in applied microeconomics. Formerly a visiting assistant professor of economics at Hamilton College, Eren has taught courses on microeconomics, macroeconomics, health economics, and the economics of immigration. He is a member of the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, the Society of Labor Economists, the Eastern Economic Association, and the Southern Economic Association. Eren received a BA in economics from Istanbul Bilgi University and an MA and a Ph.D. in economics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Thomas Masterson

Thomas Masterson is a research scholar working primarily on the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) within the Distribution of Income and Wealth program. The LIMEW is an alternative, household-based measure that reflects the resources that the household can command for facilitating current consumption or acquiring physical or financial assets. Masterson’s specific research interests include the distribution of land, income, and wealth. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the co-editor of Solidarity Economy I: Building Alternatives for People and Planet—Papers and Reports from the 2009 U.S. Forum on the Solidarity Economy, 2010.

Georges Menahem

Georges Menahem is a member of the FAIR Collective (Forum for Other Indicators of Wealth), established in 2008 to follow the work of the French Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, headed by Joseph E. Stiglitz. He is a former director of research at the Paris–Nord Economics Center (CEPN), Paris 13 University (2003–10), and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris (1983–2010). From 1991 to 2009, he was also a senior researcher at the Institute for Research and Information in Health Economics (IRDES), Paris, and, from 1969 to 1983, a staff economist for the Society for the Study of Economic and Social Development (SEDES), Paris. He has served on the faculty of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, 1990–94) and the National School of Statistics and Economic Administration (ENSAE, 1988–2004), and from 2005 to 2008 taught a course on the economy of security and social protection at Paris 13 University. In 2008–09, he held a research and teaching fellowship in the economics department of Dalhousie University. Menahem received degrees in physics, mathematics, and statistics from the University of Sciences (Grenoble); a diploma from CEPE (Center for the Study of Economic Programs); and a Ph.D. in economics from Paris 10 University.

Andrew Sharpe

Andrew Sharpe is founder and executive director of the Ottawa-based Centre for the Study of Living Standards (CSLS). Established in 1995, CSLS is a national, independent, nonprofit research organization. Its main objectives are to study trends and determinants of productivity, living standards, and economic well-being, and to develop policy recommendations to improve the lives of Canadians. He previously held a variety of other positions, including head of research at the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre and chief of business sector analysis at the Department of Finance. He is also founder and editor of the International Productivity Monitor and executive director of the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth, which is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to income and wealth. He holds an MA and a Ph.D in economics from McGill University, a maitrise in urban geography from the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, and a BA from the University of Toronto.

Michael S. Teitelbaum

Michael S. Teitelbaum is program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York and Wertheim Fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, where he is writing a book on the US science and engineering workforce. He previously served on the faculty of Princeton University and the University of Oxford. By specialty, Teitelbaum is a demographer, with research interests that include the causes and consequences of very low fertility rates, the processes and implications of international migration, and patterns and trends in science and engineering labor markets in the United States and elsewhere. He is the author or editor of 10 books and a large number of articles on these subjects. Between 1990 and 1997, he served as vice-chair and acting chair of the US Commission on International Migration, and prior to that was a member of the US Commission on International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development. He is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Teitelbaum was educated at Reed College and at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Edward N. Wolff

Senior Scholar Edward N. Wolff is a professor of economics at New York University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He leads the Levy Institute’s distribution of income and wealth program, and the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) project. His principal research areas are the distribution of income and wealth, and productivity growth. Wolff is a past managing editor of The Review of Income and Wealth and the author of numerous books, including Growth, Accumulation, and Unproductive Activity, 1987; Productivity and American Leadership (with W. J. Baumol and S. B. Blackman), 1989; Competitiveness, Convergence, and International Specialization (with D. Dollar), 1993; Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America, 1995; Retirement Insecurity, 2002; Downsizing in America (with W. J. Baumol and A. S. Blinder), 2003; Retirement Income: The Crucial Role of Social Security (with Christian Weller), 2005; and Does Education Really Help? Skill, Work, and Inequality, 2006. He holds an AB from Harvard College and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Ajit Zacharias

Senior Scholar Ajit Zacharias’s research interests include concepts and measurement of economic well-being, effects of taxes and government spending on well-being, valuation of noncash transfers, and time use. He, along with other Levy scholars, developed the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW), and utilizes the measure in tracking trends in economic inequality and well-being in the United States. Zacharias is currently codirecting two research projects. The first is aimed at developing comparable measures of economic well-being in four other OECD countries, all with widely varying political-economic systems: Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. An effort to develop poverty thresholds that incorporate household production in three Latin American countries—Argentina, Chile, and Mexico—is the main task of the second project. His recent publications include “Do Gender Disparities in Employment Increase Profitability? Evidence from the United States” (with M. Mahoney), Feminist Economics, July 2009; Household Wealth and the Measurement of Economic Well-Being in the United States” (with E. N. Wolff ), Journal of Economic Inequality, June 2009; and A New Look at the Economic Well-Being of the Elderly in the United States, 1989–2001” (with E. N. Wolff), Journal of Income Distribution, March 2009. Zacharias holds an MA from the University of Bombay and a Ph.D. from The New School for Social Research.