Most inequality and poverty theory analyzes "equivalent income" distributions for homogeneous populations: incomes are assumed to be deflated by an equivalence scale that accounts for differences in needs between households. Yet in practice there is no consensus about what the appropriate...

The authors develop two simple measures of how much inequality is explained by individual population characteristics or groups of characteristics, analogous to R[superscript 2] in regression analysis. The authors investigate the measures' empirical implementation using several alternative...

The authors respond to J. Banks and P. Johnson's (1994) comment on Coulter et al. (1992) drawing on a more general discussion of parametric equivalence scale and scale relativity issues and new empirical results. The authors show that criticisms of their earlier work are unfounded. When the...

We analyse the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a family headed by a single mother. Growing up in a non-intact family in Germany is associated with worse outcomes in models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and...

The paper uses BHPS waves 1–5 (1991–5) to compare paid work participation rates of men and women. Year-on-year persistence in paid work propensities is high, but greater for men than women. Non-work persistence is higher for women. Using panel data probit regression models, the paper also...

Eight explanations for U.K. income inequality trends between 1971 and 1986 are assessed by pooling evidence from inequality index decompositions by population sub-group and by income source. The principal causes of the aggregate trends were a mixture of changes in earnings inequality, employment...

We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures of income risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as a source of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contribution to total income risk of demographic and labour market factors....

This paper models the probability a lone mother is in employment and the probability a lone mother works full-time using the 1989 U.K. Lone Parents Survey. It complements the work by J. F. Ermisch and R. E. Wright (1991) and I. Walker (1990) based on data from the late 1970s and early 1980s....

Three 'I's of poverty curves, based on distributions of poverty gaps, provide evocative graphical summaries of the incidence, intensity, and inequality dimensions of poverty, and a means for checking for unanimous poverty orderings according to a wide class of poverty indices. The orderings may...