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Income Distribution, Familial Socioeconomic Status and Household Consumption Behavior: An Empirical Investigation of Taiwanese Nuclear Family
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Chen, Ying-Che
Abstract
Income inequality of household in Taiwan has been growing since 1980 and risen over years. One of the main causes of increasing inequality is due to the change of family structure into nuclear family. Past research had paid attention on the decomposition of income inequality in Taiwan, while few studies had discussed the extent to which increasing income inequality may affect household consumption behavior. Therefore, this study attempts to investigate the distinction between high and low inequality areas in the final average expenditure of nuclear households, and also to analyze how the social-economic characteristics influence household consumption.his study utilized the Survey of family Income and Expenditure in Taiwan in 2006. The initial data is 13,776 households, and the final sample is 6063, distinguishing nuclear household from the others. OLS and Tobit model are commonly employed when it comes to the average consumption of nuclear households. However, these two models only show the analysis on average, and fail to explain the distributional effect. As an alternative, this study estimate a quantile regression model to analyze the effects of exogenous variables on the distribution of the household consumptions. Results show that household average expenditure in high inequality area are greater than in the low inequality for food expenditure, alcohol drink expenditure, and travel expenditure. That is, these three consumption expenditures increase significantly in high income household of the high inequality area. In addition, these three consumption expenditures have positive effects at high quantiles, indicating that the expenditure will increase in the high consumption household of high inequality area.
Subjects
household consumption
income inequality
tobit model
quantile regression model
censored quantile regression model
Type
thesis
File(s)
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Name
ntu-98-R96627022-1.pdf
Size
23.53 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):ffe60dbbc4e2a96db3f4de1e6374c266