This study investigates the impact of Left political institutions on a nation's amount of poverty. Specifically, the analysis tests three possible causal relationships: whether Left political institutions affect poverty separately from the welfare state, channeled through the welfare state, or...

The present study examines whether and to what extent welfare-family policies are likely to affect earnings inequality between economically active men and women. Using hierarchical linear models, we combine individual-level variables (obtained from the Luxembourg Income Study) with country level...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes according to features related to centralisation is...

The Luxembourg Income Study data is used to explore the impact of taxes and transfer payments on the distribution of income across thirteen countries for different years. The five-parameter generalized beta distribution and ten of its special cases are considered as models for the size...

I study the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience. Voters care more about the well-being of those belonging to their own group than the rest of the population. Within a model of political tax determination, both fractionalization and group antagonism reduce the support for...

In this paper I analyse a probabilistic voting model where political candidates choose a direct taxation policy to maximise the probability of winning elections. Society is divided into groups which have different preferences for consumption of leisure or, in other words, are differently...

This paper advances the understanding of income inequality by examining quintile shares of income among households headed by someone age 25-59 in 14 OECD nations. In examining quintile shares, the author attempts to resolve the contradictory findings from past research. Furthermore, the analysis...

The paper investigates how the income distribution affects the subjective well-being of society. Starting from the concept of a social welfare function defined on income distributions it assesses the preference for equality in European countries. It examines how mean income and the distribution...

For a long time conventional wisdom held that income inequality enhances investment and work incentives and thereby is good for economic growth. In the 1990s this view was turned on its head, as a number of empirical analyses found an association between inequality and slower growth across large...

This paper investigates wage gaps between part- and full-time women workers in six OECD countries in the mid-1990s. Using comparable micro-data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), for Canada, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and the US, the paper first assesses crossnational variation in the...