Mean Wealth Research Articles

Disabilities, shared capitalism, and wealth: evidence from health and retirement survey

ABSTRACT Does shared capitalism help to mitigate the economic effects of disability? Employee ownership and profit sharing are linked to higher incomes and wealth for workers, while disability is strongly linked to lower incomes, but there has been no prior research on their overlapping effects. Using household-level panel data from Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) restricted to households with at least one earner, we provide exploratory results on the relationships among disability, shared capitalism, and wealth. We find that: 1) disability households have lower mean and median wealth (one-third to one-half lower than non-disability households using the most comprehensive disability measure); 2) disability households are less likely to participate in shared capitalism (only three-fourths as likely as non-disability households using the most comprehensive disability measure); 3) shared capitalism is linked to a greater increase in wealth for disability households than for non-disability households, but disability wealth gaps remain even when shared capitalism is available. While we cannot make strong causal claims, these findings suggest that shared capitalism may play a positive role in wealth-building for people both with and without disabilities, and help to mitigate some of the economic disadvantages faced by people with disabilities.

Effects of a monthly unconditional cash transfer starting at birth on family investments among US families with low income.

How does unconditional income for families in poverty affect parental investments for their young children? Mothers in four US metropolitan areas were randomized to receive a monthly unconditional cash transfer of either $333 per month (high) or $20 per month (low) for the first several years after childbirth. During the first 3 years, high-cash gift households spent more money on child-specific goods and more time on child-specific early learning activities than the low-cash gift group. Few changes were evident in other core household expenditures. Compared with low-cash gift families, high-cash gift families reported lower rates of public benefit receipt and fewer were residing in poverty, although mean income and wealth remain low for the majority of families by year 3. No statistically significant differences were evident in mothers' participation in paid work, children's time in childcare or mothers' subjective wellbeing.

Ayat Muhkamat dan Ayat Mutasyabihat: Tinjauan Sumber Hukum Ekonomi Islam

The importance of understanding and studying the sources of Islamic law is the main basis for Muslims in living their lives from time to time. The Koran is the highest source of law which is the main reference in determining Islamic law. The Koran contains more than six thousand verses, collected in one hundred and fourteen suras. Among the verses of the Koran there are what are called muhkamat verses and mutasyabihat verses. One aspect that needs to be considered is the difference between muhkamat and mutasyabihat verses in the Koran. Muhkamat verses are verses whose meaning is clear, namely verses other than mutasyabihat verses. The muhkamat verses explain something and give details, whether it is forbidden or lawful, regarding good promises or bad promises, regarding reward or punishment, warnings or prohibitions, whether they contain news or i'tibar advice or similes or something similar, all of them This is explained in detail and clearly. As for the existence of the mutasyabihat verse, even though it has a wealth of meaning, the translation is carried out by considering the context and hadith.

Inflation, Interest, and the Secular Rise in Wealth Inequality in the United States: Is the Fed Responsible?

Two hallmarks of U.S. monetary policy since the 1981–1982 recession are declining interest rates and moderation in inflation, at least until recently. Coincident with these trends was a surge in U.S. wealth inequality, with the Gini coefficient up by 0.070 between 1983 and 2019. This article analyzes the connection between these two developments on the basis of the Survey of Consumer Finances. Contrary to expectations, the article finds that these two monetary effects reduced wealth inequality rather than increasing it. The effect is quite sizeable, with the Gini coefficient declining by 0.045 over these years. Asset price changes and debt devaluation also accounted for 72.6 percent of the advance of mean wealth and would have led to a 204.9 percent gain in median wealth compared to its actual rise of 23.4 percent. Moreover, they helped lower the racial wealth gap rather than enlarging it. These results are at odds with previous literature in which estimates range from a weak negative effect on inequality to neutral, small positive, and strong positive. In terms of methodology, this article differs from previous work by focusing on only the direct effects of interest rate changes and inflation on the household balance sheet.

EXPRESSIVE GRAPHICS AS A COMPONENT OF THE LANGUAGE GAME IN LEWIS CARROLL’S LITERARY FAIRY TALE ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

The fairy tale “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll is one of the most popular children’s literary works, which has not lost its relevance for almost 160 years. During this time, the phantasmagoric story was never taken out of print, and was translated into 174 languages. The main aim of the article is the analysis of graphical stylistic devices in Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, which is a real cultural phenomenon. Linguistic and extra-linguistic devices create the world of the tale.The methodology includes literature review related to the topic; methods of analysis, classification and comparative analysis. It includes the methods of literature analysis of the stylistic role of the word game. As the word game, especially the creation of neologisms, the use of graphic means of highlighting become the ways of designing an original text and an unreal-real world. The analysis of transformations of the artistic language as a means of overcoming the framework of the game space and its inherent closedness extend beyond the analysis of only a visual framework of the text but becomes the study of the main idea if it could be found in this extraordinary piece of literature. The vast majority of studies devoted to the works of L. Carroll touch upon the problems of the play of words in his works and aspects of the translation experience. The study of any fiction text inevitably involves the study of the features of its graphic design. It is well-known that graphics is a means of securing information; in a fiction text, where any unit is potentially expressive, graphic means carry a pragmatic load, and therefore are one of the ways to influence the addressee of written speech. An extraordinary way of use of graphics draws the reader’s attention to the form of writing. Thus, the form becomes significant and, interacting with the meaning of the graphically selected lexical unit, makes it semantically more complicated. The main graphic means of expression include paragraph organization, punctuation marks, numbering, typefaces, combination of fonts of different languages, color selection, underlining, deliberate division into syllables, creation of figurative elements (most often in poetic works of art), etc. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is a complex and unique fantasy story but usually accepted and interpreted as a fairy tale. This is a kind of allusion to the author’s modern world. The artistic world lives according to its own laws. Many characters and episodes of the book, funny lines and situations are not random, but deeply motivated: they are fully based on the play of words, on the revival of metaphors, on the literal interpretation of components, phraseological combinations and puns. The author’s text of the fairy tale can be defined as a game and two main principles of its formation can be identified, namely: the creation of unusual language material and its non-standard (non-linear) organization of the text. Among the indicated graphic means of expression, L. Carroll’s work is primarily characterized by font selection (capital letters and italics), deliberate division of words into syllables, and the creation of figurative verse. It is concluded that the general peculiarity of L. Carroll’s fairy tale is the extremely high artistic value of the work, which is manifested in the wealth of stylistic means and techniques and is ambiguously perceived by readers due to the structure of the text itself. The writer’s attitude to the interaction between the text and the reader is important. The latter’s perception of the text will be qualitatively different depending on whether the reader understands the playful nature of the work or perceives it as an ordinary text. The elements of the game are the characters, the narrative style of the work, and the language tools used by the author at different levels

"Shummun, Bukmun, 'Umyun", Words in Ayat Quranic: A Stylistic Analysis to Understand Language Nuances and Deep Meanings

The Ayat of the Quran contains a wealth of meanings and deep nuances of language. In this study, we conducted a stylistic analysis of the words صمّ، بكم، عمي in Quranic Ayats to explore deeper nuances of language and meaning. This method of analysis involves tracing the use of these keywords in various ayat contexts and research related to the grammar and semantics of the Quran. The results showed that the words are often used in contexts emphasising the importance of listening, observing, and understanding the divine message. They also give a new dimension to understanding blindness and deafness in a spiritual context. This research provides further insight into the use of language in the Quran, illustrating how certain words evoke feelings, reflection, and deep appreciation of religious teachings. By stylistically analysing, this research contributes to a further understanding the use of Arabic in religious literature and bridges the gap between classical texts and contemporary understanding

Monetary Policy: The Impact and Incidence on Stock Prices

“Dhanam Mulam Idam Jatath” is a Sanskrit proverb that means "Wealth is the root of this world." It is often used to emphasize the importance of wealth in achieving success in life. The word "dhanam" means wealth, "mulam" means root, and "jagat" means the world (Chanakya). The experience, knowledge, time, effort, sweat, and blood of people together earn money through various means and ways. To intuit and innovate, to solve and resolve, to create and recreate, to produce and promote, and to destroy and develop from beginning to end, we need money. The impact of monetary policy is there on every sector of an economy, and investments in the stock market are no exception to that. A liberal monetary policy boosts investments in markets and vice versa. The specified study is objectively focused on identifying and studying the impact of monetary policy on investments in general and on equities (selected) in particular. The monetary policy index has been constructed with help of the RBI by considering the weights given as per the above-mentioned values, and the MPI values were framed from 2012–13 to 2022–23. The VECM is used to conduct this study along with the Monetary Policy Index (MPI). The results of the study produced mixed inferences, i.e., on specific stocks, it has a positive relationship, and on others, it has a negative relationship. While acknowledging the persisting cyclical and long-term risks and challenges, the paper addresses dimensions of investment in markets and offers suggestions on ‘Economic Prosperity’ and ‘Sustainable Economic Development (SED)’ in the long run.

The Sky and the Stratosphere: Wealth Concentration in India During the Last (Lost) Decade

AbstractThis paper provides new and improved estimates of wealth concentration in India during 2012–2018. Official surveys show a decline in wealth inequality and mean wealth per adult for the first time in three decades. We argue that although these wealth surveys are meant to be nationally representative, they underestimate the upper tail of the Indian wealth distribution—top wealth levels appear orders of magnitudes below externally measured estimates and unrepresentative of increasing stock‐market participation over this period. By combining official surveys and rich lists, we provide new estimates of top wealth shares and total personal wealth in India. We find that personal wealth is underestimated by nearly 54 percent in official data, and this gap increased sharply during the 2010s. Our revised estimates show wealth concentration to have sharply increased during 2012–2018. The share of India's top 1 percent is higher than similar estimates for Asia, and second only to Russia.

An ancient and modern spectre: Edmund Burke and the return of democracy

ABSTRACT In 1790, Edmund Burke was among the first to brand the French representative government as democracy. Revolutionary France was generating the spectre of ancient Greece and that of direct participation in government. In his battle Burke went beyond these rhetorical tropes and transformed the concept of democracy into a complex polemic target. In fact, he analyzed the features of the emerging political order highlighting the dangers and weaknesses therein and demonizing it completely. In so doing, Burke ascribed a wealth of new meanings to the idea of democracy, going beyond the experience of the ancients and contributing to a wholly negative assessment of the Revolution that posed it as the antithesis to the gallant civilization of the Old Regime. Burke radically rejected the idea that the right to vote could be based on an abstract natural right and criticized the so-called ‘revolt of enterprising talents’ in all fields, because it would have led to the destruction of aristocracy and religion. He also described the religious dimension of the democratic project, which turned democracy into a secularized religion and addressed the issue of power legitimacy: a democratic order posed dire and unpredictable dangers and offered no guarantees of surviving over time.

Belgium’s Successful Ride on the Elephant? The Diverging Effects of High Homeownership Rates on Inequalities

ABSTRACT This paper studies the contradictory effects of pro-homeownership policies on inequalities through the case of Belgium. While the literature describes high homeownership rates as levellers of wealth inequalities, this paper finds, using national microdata from ECHP and EU-SILC, that different mechanisms underlying homeownership growth have had contradictory effects on economic inequalities, even in the absence of a housing crisis or increase in income inequalities. Inequalities in the weight of rental costs have risen for newly contracted rental agreements in the last decade, while wealth inequalities are rising because of an increasingly exclusive mortgage-credit market. Current measurements of wealth inequalities are based on the distribution of net wealth, thereby missing the evolution of the difference between mean wealth and no wealth and the dynamic nature of wealth accumulation. Therefore, inequalities are rising in Belgium as poorer renters are increasingly constrained by rental costs when they are increasingly excluded from accessing homeownership.

Inequality and Elections in Italy, 1994–2018

The increase in income and wealth inequality in Italy is well documented, but less attention has been devoted to its association with social and political outcomes. This article investigates the association between inequality and several variables on socio-economic conditions with the evolution of Italian politics over the 1994–2018 period. Voting in Italy’s regions for the centre-left and centre-right coalitions—with a focus on the Lega—is examined in seven rounds of general elections, before and after the 2008 crisis, which emerges as a key divide in these relationships. The centre-left vote is higher in the regions with an increase in mean wealth and employment rates and shows a reversal after 2008 in the support of part time employees. The centre-right vote is associated with impoverished middle classes and an increase in disparities of Southern regions. The associations shown by Lega voting are distinct from those of other centre-right forces. While political and cultural factors are important to understand political changes, our findings show that a more unequal and distressed society is clearly associated with changes in electoral behaviour.

Stories and fairy tales - the importance and role in the instructional - educational activities in the kindergarten

"act: For many children, kindergarten is the place where they first come into contact with the wonderful world of stories. Through their richness and diversity of thought, they contribute to the development of thinking, memory, imagination, concentration, language, and to the moral and aesthetic education of children. The role and importance of stories and fairy tales in instructive-educational activities are obvious, as they enrich the vocabulary, develop the ability to communicate and relate, influence intellectual development and will. Stories play an essential role in the formation of the human being because of their ""discourse"" of order and meaning. They are those who, through the beauty of words, bring children into a world of values where good always triumphs over evil, constituting a wealth of meaning and educational value."

Jak powiedzieć, żeby nie powiedzieć (lub odwrotnie), czyli kłopoty z przekładem elegii wygnańczej Owidiusza „Ex P.” IV 12

Aside from its wealth of meaning and contexts, Ovid’s poetry seems to be sometimes difficult to translate into Polish. This paper shows such an extreme situation using the example of Ex P IV 12, where the translator is virtually helpless in the face of the poet’s subtle sense of humor and sophisticated play with a reader on the grounds of the nature of Roman elegiac distich.

Concept as the Activist of Creativity in Architectural Design: Exploring Factors Affecting Concept Formation Using the Structural Equation Model

In the contemporary understanding of architectural design, the concept is essential in that it drives the creative aspect of a designer, provides design a wealth of meaning, and initiates and shapes the design process. Based on the importance of the concept in architectural design, this study aimed to examine the factors affecting the concept formation of architect candidates/architects in design education and practice. For this purpose, a pilot study in the first phase of the study tested a survey distributed to two groups of participants, namely architecture undergraduate students and practising architects in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. The data obtained from the survey were analyzed with the SPSS software and measurement tools were identified and then, weights of the factors were determined using the Structural Equation Model (SEM). According to the analysis results, the factors affecting concept formation in architectural design are the design problem, context, designer-induced values, and user-induced values according to their weighted importance. One of the main reasons the design problem and context are pioneers in determining concept is that these factors hold a strong place in the traditions and teachings of design education. In addition, depending on the way architecture students and practicing architects experience the profession, their attitudes towards creating concepts in their designs may vary.

Looking Backward into the Future: Thoughts on the Study of the Past, Ritual, and Women’s Eucharistic Experiences in Byzantium

As a student of Christian visual production of the so-called medieval period (specializing in Byzantine culture), I have often marveled at the theological richness of seemingly simple narratives that could communicate a wealth of possible meanings in the eyes of their intended original audiences. The mundane act of Mary drawing water from a well or spinning purple thread at the time of her Annunciation (whether in verbal or visual forms of storytelling) could resonate with deep theological significance in the minds of cultural insiders who were familiar with the basic religious beliefs, symbols, scriptural sources, rituals, and other cultural practices of their tradition. Believing they lived in a universe created by their God and ruled by his laws and providence, Christians of the past were taught to seek deeper meaning and guidance in aspects of the material world, their daily experiences, and their communal history, as all these manifestations could reveal divine wisdom and God’s plan for human salvation. In this context, familiar and simple objects like water or thread could make complex theological concepts more relatable and understandable to the faithful.

Association Between Racial Wealth Inequities and Racial Disparities in Longevity Among US Adults and Role of Reparations Payments, 1992 to 2018

In the US, Black individuals die younger than White individuals and have less household wealth, a legacy of slavery, ongoing discrimination, and discriminatory public policies. The role of wealth inequality in mediating racial health inequities is unclear. To assess the contribution of wealth inequities to the longevity gap that exists between Black and White individuals in the US and to model the potential effects of reparations payments on this gap. This cohort study analyzed the association between wealth and survival among participants in the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative panel study of community-dwelling noninstitutionalized US adults 50 years or older that assessed data collected from April 1992 to July 2019. Participants included 7339 non-Hispanic Black (hereinafter Black) and 26 162 non-Hispanic White (hereinafter White) respondents. Data were analyzed from January 1 to September 17, 2022. Household wealth, the sum of all assets (including real estate, vehicles, and investments), minus the value of debts. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality by the end of survey follow-up in 2018. Using parametric survival models, the associations among household wealth, race, and survival were evaluated, adjusting for age, sex, number of household members, and marital status. Additional models controlled for educational level and income. The survival effects of eliminating the current mean wealth gap with reparations payments ($828 055 per household) were simulated. Of the 33 501 individuals in the sample, a weighted 50.1% were women, and weighted mean (SD) age at study entry was 59.3 (11.1) years. Black participants' median life expectancy was 77.5 (95% CI, 77.0-78.2) years, 4 years shorter than the median life expectancy for White participants (81.5 [95% CI, 81.2-81.8] years). Adjusting for demographic variables, Black participants had a hazard ratio for death of 1.26 (95% CI, 1.18-1.34) compared with White participants. After adjusting for differences in wealth, survival did not differ significantly by race (hazard ratio, 1.00 [95% CI, 0.92-1.08]). In simulations, reparations to close the mean racial wealth gap were associated with reductions in the longevity gap by 65.0% to 102.5%. The findings of this cohort study suggest that differences in wealth are associated with the longevity gap that exists between Black and White individuals in the US. Reparations payments to eliminate the racial wealth gap might substantially narrow racial inequities in mortality.

REFLEKSI NAFS DALAM KISAH NABI YUSUF AS DAN ZULAIKHA: ANALISIS TAFSIR AL-MISHBAH KARYA QURAISH SHIHAB

The story of the Prophet Yusuf as ahsanul qashas (the best story) which is enshrined in the Qur'an. The story of the Prophet Yusuf is a story that has a wealth of meaning and learning in all aspects of life. This article attempts to analyze the richness of meaning contained in surah Yusuf which is related to the levels and expressions of the nafs. The research method in this article uses descriptive qualitative with a library research approach. Theoretical analysis uses the perspective of Tafsir Al-Mishbah by Quraish Shihab. The purpose of this research is to answer how the expression of nafs and levels of nafs are contained in the story of Prophet Yusuf and Zulaikha. The results of the study show that the nafs in the story of Prophet Yusuf and Zulaikha are distinguished by two tendencies: First, the level of anger in Zulaikha's personality and behavior which is depicted in obedience to lust and following the devil's temptations. Second, the levels of muthmainnah and radhiyah nafs in Yusuf's personality which are described by calm, obedience, peace, and fortitude in going through every test given by Allah SWT. The study in this research is limited to the story of persuasion planned by Zulaikha.

Laying Out Feast-Offerings

In the literature on sacred food in Hinduism, vegetarian offerings to Sanskritic deities (Sanskrit naivedya, prasada; Tamil naivettiyam, pracatam) are privileged. If meat is mentioned, it is in reference to sacrificial worship; and even so, the analysis often stops at ritual killing. Here, however, I focus on the wealth of religious meanings and ritual dynamics inherent to the ritual display and communal feasting—incorporating, if not centred on, meat—known as pataiyal or feast-offerings, performed in or after worship. I describe two forms of these feast-offerings: (1) following sacrificial worship to tutelary deities in rural Tamil Nadu and (2) during worship to divinized ancestors in Singapore. Departing from Brahminical exegeses, I probe the meanings and merits of meat offerings from the perspective of those immersed in the agrarian productive process (farmers and those from farming traditions) for whom eating meat, if not killing animals, is routine. Meat offerings, I argue, are not so much arbitrators of ritual purity-pollution or hierarchy, but more of kinship and commensality, and thus intimacy, between specific deities and their devotees. I foreground a pragmatic everyday theology, not necessarily explicit, but inherent to the lives, worlds, religious beliefs and ritual practices of ordinary peoples living their ordinary lives.

Generalised calibration with latent variables for the treatment of unit nonresponse in sample surveys

Sample surveys may suffer from nonignorable unit nonresponse. This happens when the decision of whether or not to participate in the survey is correlated with variables of interest; in such a case, nonresponse produces biased estimates for parameters related to those variables, even after adjustments that account for auxiliary information. This paper presents a method to deal with nonignorable unit nonresponse that uses generalised calibration and latent variable modelling. Generalised calibration enables to model unit nonresponse using a set of auxiliary variables (instrumental or model variables), that can be different from those used in the calibration constraints (calibration variables). We propose to use latent variables to estimate the probability to participate in the survey and to construct a reweighting system incorporating such latent variables. The proposed methodology is illustrated, its properties discussed and tested on two simulation studies. Finally, it is applied to adjust estimates of the finite population mean wealth from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth.

Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth, 1858–2018: Evidence from Probate

AbstractIn the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles, and disdain for commerce, helped on by reductions in the value of agricultural land from the 1870s. This article reappraises these arguments by examining the decline of the hereditary peerage's wealth using a newly created data set that includes all available probate grants for peers from 1858 to 2018. The article challenges established research by finding that peers’ absolute wealth but also relative mean wealth did not decline during the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and that serious decline only began and accelerated from World War II. Signs of resurgence appeared in the 1980s, with the value of peers’ grants reaching Victorian levels in real but not relative terms. The comprehensive character of the data and the distinction between real and relative wealth allow for multiple conceptual and analytic additions to the existing debates. We find that new peerages created for businessmen who were much wealthier than the older, landed peers masked decline in the interwar years. Significantly, however, the differences in wealth between old and new peerages disappeared over time, suggesting that the wider aristocracy's decline was due less to characteristics particular to it than to external forces allied to the broader postwar political and fiscal environment.