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Using the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II dataset, we examine the role that household income plays in the emergence of consumer-oriented start-ups by individual (solo), family-based (family), and non-family based start-ups (team). In particular, we address the research question: Does household income impact firm emergence, and if so, is emergence impacted differently based on start-up configuration? Our results indicate that household income does have a significant impact on average firm emergence, as well as on emergence growth rates for solo and family firms, playing an especially significant role for family firms. Furthermore, we found that household income is not a significant predictor of start-up activity completion for teams. Results from our study reinforce the extant literature on the benefits of starting a firm with teams, and suggests that these enterprise types may provide a more stable platform on which to launch a start-up. Implications of these findings and opportunities for future research are offered.

This study investigates the relationships among digital transformation, technological innovation, industry–university–research collaborations and labor income share in manufacturing firms.

The relationships are tested using an empirical method, constructing regression models, by collecting 1,240 manufacturing firms and 9,029 items listed on the A-share market in China from 2013 to 2020.

The results indicate that digital transformation has a positive effect on manufacturing companies’ labor income share. Technological innovation can mediate the effect of digital transformation on labor income share. Industry–university–research cooperation can positively moderate the promotion effect of digital transformation on labor income share but cannot moderate the mediating effect of technological innovation. Heterogeneity analysis also found that firms without service-based transformation and nonstate-owned firms are better able to increase their labor income share through digital transformation.

This study provides a new path to increase the labor income share of enterprises to achieve common prosperity, which is important for manufacturing enterprises to better transform and upgrade to achieve high-quality development.

Bipolar and depression disorders are some of the most common mental health disorders affecting millions of people in low-and middle-income countries, including those in Africa. These disorders are therefore major contributors to the burden of diseases and disability. While an enhancement in income is seen as a major approach towards reducing the burden of these disorders, empirical evidence to support this view in the African context is lacking. This study therefore aims to examine the effect of per capita income growth on bipolar and depression disorders across African countries.

The study uses data from secondary sources comprising 42 African countries over the period, 2002–2019, to achieve its objective. The prevalence of bipolar and major depressive disorders (depression) are used as the dependent variables, while per capita income growth is used as the main independent variable. The system Generalised Method of Moments regression is used as the estimation technique.

In the baseline, the authors find per capita income growth to be associated with a reduction in the prevalence of bipolar (coefficient: −0.001, p < 0.01) and depression (coefficient: −0.001, p < 0.1) in the short-term. Similarly, in the long-term, per capita income growth is found to have negative association with the prevalence of bipolar (coefficient: −0.059, p < 0.01) and depression (coefficient: −0.035, p < 0.1). The results are similar after robustness checks.

This study attempts at providing the first empirical evidence of the effect of per capita income growth on bipolar and depression disorders across several African countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havoc on economies around the world. The purpose of this study is to learn about the distributional impacts of the pandemic.

The authors contribute new theoretical and empirical evidence on the distributional impacts of the pandemic on different income groups in a multicountry setting. The authors analyze rich individual-level survey data covering 6,082 respondents from China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. The results are robust to various econometric models, including ordinary least squares (OLS), Tobit and ordered probit models with country-fixed effects.

The authors find that while the outbreak has no impact on household income losses, it results in a 63% reduction in the expected own labor income for the second-poorest income quintile. The pandemic impacts are most noticeable for savings, with all the four poorer income quintiles suffering reduced savings ranging between 5 and 7% compared to the richest income quintile. The poor are also less likely to change their behaviors regarding immediate prevention measures against COVID-19 and healthy activities. The authors also found countries to exhibit heterogeneous impacts.

Designing tailor-made social protection and health policies to support the poorer income groups in richer and poorer countries can generate multiple positive impacts that help minimize the negative and inequality-enhancing pandemic consequences. These findings are relevant not only for COVID-19 but also for future pandemics.

The authors theoretically and empirically investigate the impacts of the pandemic on poorer income groups, while previous studies mostly offer empirical analyses and focus on other sociodemographic factors. The authors offer a new multicountry analysis of several prevention measures against COVID-19 and specific health activities.

With the recognition that generating economic growth is not the same as sustaining it, the challenge to catch-up and growth literature is discerning between these processes. Recent research suggests that the decline in the frequency of “shrinking” episodes is more important for long-term development than higher growth rates. By using a framework centred around social capabilities, this study aims to investigate the effects of income inequality and poverty on economic shrinking frequency, as opposed to previous literature that has exclusively had a growth focus. The aim is to investigate how and why some societies might be more resilient to economic shrinking.

The research is a quantitative study, and the authors build a longitudinal data set including 23 developing countries throughout 42 years to test the paper’s purpose. This study uses country and period fixed-effects specifications as well as cross-sectional graphical representations to investigate the relationship between proxies of economic inclusivity and the frequency of shrinking episodes.

The authors demonstrate that while inclusive societies are more resilient to shrinking overall, it is changes in poverty levels, but not changes in income inequality, that appear to be correlated with economic shrinking frequency. Inequality, while still an important element to explain countries’ growth potential as an initial condition, does not seem to make the sample more resilient to shrinking. The authors conclude that the mechanisms in which poverty and inequality are correlated with the catch-up process must run through different channels. Ultimately, processes that explain growth may intersect but not always overlap with the ones that explain resilience to shrinking.

The need for inclusive growth in long-term development has been championed for decades, yet inclusion has seldom been explored from the shrinking perspective. Though poverty reduction is already an important mainstream political objective, this paper differentiates itself by providing an alternate viewpoint of why this is important. Income inequality could have more of an economic growth limiting effect, while poverty reduction could be required to build resilience to economic shrinking. Developing countries will need both growth and resilience to shrinking, to catch-up with higher-income economies, which policymakers might need to balance carefully.

This study examines the impact of competition and concentration on bank income smoothing in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The two-step system GMM method was used to analyse the impact of competition and concentration on bank income smoothing in 17 CEEs from 2004 to 2015.

Loan loss provisions (LLPs) are negatively related to bank competition and concentration. The authors find no evidence for income smoothing using LLPs in a high-competition or high-concentration environment.

A limitation of the study is that the analysis was restricted to commercial banks. The authors did not examine investment banks or microfinance banks in this study. Also, not having access to databases does not allow them to include recent years in the study.

CEE commercial banks will likely keep fewer provisions or engage in under-provisioning when they face intense competition, and this can expose them to credit risk, which may threaten their stability.

This study is the first to investigate the effect of concentration and competition on income smoothing among CEE banks.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of private and public initiatives (financial literacy, entrepreneurship, remote work and government aid) on individual job loss and decrease in income during the COVID-19 pandemic in Peru.

The authors used an unbalanced panel data analysis with the National Household Survey for 2019–2020. The hypotheses are tested with a probit panel data model since the dependent variables are binary.

The study findings indicate that financial preparedness reduced the probability of having a decrease in income, but only to informal workers in metropolitan Lima. Furthermore, entrepreneurship helped mainly female informal workers to reduce their probability of becoming unemployed in metropolitan Lima. Besides, the implementation of remote work as a substitute of face-to-face work was not enough to avoid the decrease in income in the case of informal workers and it was only effective to avoid unemployment in the case of formal workers in metropolitan Lima. Finally, public aid proved to be instrumental in mitigating the decrease in income, but only to informal workers in Metropolitan Lima.

The study results only apply for the first year of the pandemic.

Policymakers should focus on increasing the financial preparedness of informal workers, especially in provinces.

Policymakers must expand unemployment benefits, and design public aid programs targeting informal workers in provinces.

This is the first study that analyses the impact of private and public initiatives on the decrease in income and unemployment situation of Peruvian individuals during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the adjustment of government redistributive policies in Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries following changes in income inequality over the period 1980–2021.

The authors first modelled the time-varying dynamics between income inequality and redistribution and then used a non-linear framework to test for the existence of asymmetries and cointegration in their long-run relationship. The authors used two complementary measures of inequality – the share of total income accruing to top percentile income holders and the ratio of the share of total income accruing to top decile income holders divided by that accumulated by the bottom 50% – and computed redistribution as the difference between the two inequality indicators before and after taxes and transfers.

The authors found that the sign of the relationship between income inequality and redistribution is mostly positive and time-varying. Overall, the authors also found evidence that the impact of increases in inequality on redistributive measures is higher than that of decreases. Finally, the authors obtained a significant long-run relationship between both variables in all countries except Denmark and Spain. These results hold for both Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to account for the potential existence of non-linearities and to examine the asymmetries in the adjustment of redistributive policies to increases in income inequality using alternative income inequality metrics.

Personal remittance and ready-made garments (RMG) export incomes have emerged as the largest source of foreign income for Bangladesh's economy. The study investigates their impact on income inequality and gross domestic product (GDP) as a control variable, using time-series yearly data from 1983 to 2018.

It employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimation and the Toda-Yamamoto (T-Y) causality approach. The ARDL estimation outcomes confirm a long-run association among the above variables and validate the autoregressive characteristic of the model.

Personal remittances positively contribute to reducing the income gap among the people of the society and declining income inequality. In contrast, RMG export income and economic growth contribute to further income inequality. The T-Y causality analysis follows the ARDL estimation outcomes and authenticates their robustness. It reveals a feedback relationship between remittance inflow and the Gini coefficient, unidirectional causalities from RMG export income to income inequality and economic growth to income inequality.

The finding has important policy implications to limit the income gaps between low and high-income groups by channeling incremental income to the lower-income group people. The policymakers may facilitate further international migration to attract further remittances and may upgrade the minimum wage of the RMG workers.

The study is original. As far as the authors' knowledge goes, this is a maiden attempt to investigate the impact of personal remittances and RMG export income on income disparity in the case of Bangladesh.

This paper analyzes individual subjective well-being using a survey database from the Strasbourg metropolitan development council (France). The authors focus on the effects of externalities generated by public services (transport, culture and sport), environmental quality and feeling of security in the Strasbourg metropolitan area (Eurométropole de Strasbourg, EMS). Results show that EMS specificities (public facilities, environmental quality, safety and security) and individual features like opportunities to laugh or live with children significantly influence individual well-being. These findings are robust when using three subjective measures: feeling of well-being, environmental satisfaction and social life satisfaction. The authors also show that income may affect the perceived well-being of individuals belonging to a low-income group, while individuals belonging to a high-income group tend to be unsatisfied with environmental quality but satisfied with their social life. Besides, social comparison in terms of income does not matter for individual well-being in the Strasbourg metropolitan area.

Theoretical and empirical paper —Utility theory in economics—Econometric modeling using an ordered probit model.

Specificities of the Strasbourg metropolitan area-France (public services related to transport, culture and sport, environmental quality perceived as convenient for individual health, sense of security) significantly impact individual subjective well-being. Income does not substantially impact the individual subjective perception of happiness: income may matter for the feeling of well-being only for individuals belonging to a low-income group. Wealthy individuals tend to be unsatisfied with environmental quality but satisfied with their social life. Social comparison in terms of income does not matter for individual well-being in the Strasbourg metropolitan area.

Cross-sectional data, but it is the only available database from a survey conducted by EMS in 2017 to collect information on potential elements relative to individual well-being in the Strasbourg metropolitan area.

Results shed light on the role of territorial policies in improving individual well-being and might provide some guidelines for policy-makers concerned about the population’s welfare. Policy-makers should give strong attention to public facilities (an essential element of local public action) and improve environmental quality. If they care about the population’s happiness, they have to reorient current policies in this direction. Of course, through the inquiry in 2017 giving this database, the Strasbourg agglomeration development council aimed to provide such evidence to the local administration. Nevertheless, the results were a bit upsetting for many people in the administrative and political circles, who generally prioritize economic and demographic development, while the citizens’ responses to the inquiry have revealed a strong focus on the quality of everyday life in their neighborhood.

The present study contributes to the literature on subjective well-being, with a focus on the role of local characteristics and living environment. The authors’ starting point is related to the standard utility theory, indicating that environmental quality and public services are positive externalities. The authors investigate whether the local living environment and public facilities are crucial elements explaining individual well-being. To do this, we consider three subjective measures: feeling of well-being, environmental satisfaction and social life satisfaction, which are used as proxies of individual utility. The authors consider different explicative variables representing specificities of EMS in terms of public services (transport, culture and sport), environmental quality perceived as convenient for individual health, safety and security, etc. The authors also provide a test for relative standing by including the median monthly household income at the municipality level.