Over the last two decades, those at the bottom of the income scale have seen their incomes stagnate, while those at the top have seen theirs skyrocket. Without intervention, the recession that began in December 2007 was likely to exacerbate this trend. Will the American Recovery and Reinvestment...

Although people's perception of (income or wealth) inequality has important e_ects on their decisions as economic agents or voters, little is known about how perceptions relate to measured inequality. We present a novel formal framework that is based on the assumption that people typically do...

To describe and understand the economic inequality in a given so- ciety, it is necessary to understand intra-household inequality. House- holds can hide important inequalities, but can also be essential units for redistribution in society. This paper gives an overview of within-household...

The key challenge in making distributional comparisons with ordinal data is the lack of commensurability of the distances between the ordered categories. This chapter provides a critical review of the most recent theoretical developments addressing this challenge and providing methods for...

Our study uses a small area estimation method to estimate the average and inequality of per capita kWh consumption for small areas in Vietnam. It shows evidence of a large spatial heterogeneity in the electric power consumption between districts and provinces in Vietnam. Households in the...

This paper analyzes how perceived income inequality is associated with subjective well-being. Using four waves of the "Social Inequality" module of the International Social Survey Programme, I show that the higher the level of perceived income inequality is, the lower the individual's perception...

The paper discusses the main issues related to negative and zero incomes that are relevant for the measurement of poverty. It shows the prevalence of non-positive incomes in high- and middle-income countries, provides an analysis of the sources and structure of these incomes, outlines the...

Using an online survey of Australian residents, we elicit the potential impacts of COVID-19 related labour market shocks on a validated measure of financial wellbeing. Experiencing a reduction in hours and earnings, entering into unemployment or having to file for unemployment benefits during...

As far as standard measures of income inequality are concerned, the Nordic countries rank among the most equal economies in the world. This paper studies whether and how this picture changes when the focus is on inequality of income composition, meaning the heterogeneity in individuals' factor...

We examine vulnerability to poverty in Tajikistan during the global financial crisis, focusing on the roles played by international migration and remittances, using a formal, practical, and easily decomposable vulnerability measure. Our strategy is to estimate a Markov transition probability...