Family Size and the Distribution of Per Capita Income

Abstract

Per capita income is an important notion in economics.It is used as an explanatory variable with great frequency in theoretical and empirical analyses, and its size distribution is one of the long-standing topics of economic research.Moreover, it is a concept in which public concern is as deep and sustained as is professional interest.However, information about income is often obtained for household units instead of per capita units, or for only a subset of persons (for example, wage earners).This creates difficult problems with the measurement and, indeed, the concept of per capita income.The problems include: 1) within any household the apportionment of household income to members is not in gen- eral known; 2) comparison of household income per capita among households of different structures requires judgment about the relationship between real income and family size.Remarkably little study has been done on the first of these two issues) This paper is another contribution to the vast literature which addresses the second issue.This latter issue is usually characterized as one of determining the income equiva- lence among households of various sizes.These equivalence scales can either adjust University of Chicago and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and Stanford University and NBER, respectively.

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