The objective of this work is to analyse the income inequality in the 15 EU countries during the convergence process to the Monetary Union. Using the information contained in the European Community Household Panel, corresponding to the four first waves. Using the inverse second order stochastic...

Standard official measures of economic well-being are based on money income. The general consensus is that such measures are seriously flawed because they ignore several crucial determinants of well-being. We examine two such determinants-household wealth and public consumption-in the context of...

This note is motivated by recent arguments made by Martin Feldstein in which the relevance of inequality is dismissed (if everybody's income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and the argument is made that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care...

The median voter hypothesis has been central to an extensive literature on consequences of income distribution. For example, it has been proposed that greater inequality is associated with lower growth, because of the greater redistribution that is sought by the median voter when income...

This paper analyses changes in the distribution of equivalised gross household income and income inequality in New Zealand between 1983 and 1998. We analyse the distributional effects of changes in household structure, National Superannuation (old age pension), household socio- demographic...

Using data from the Assets and Debts Survey of 1984 and the Survey of Financial Security of 1999, we document the evolution of wealth inequality in Canada between 1984 and 1999. Our main findings are as follows: 1) Wealth inequality has increased between 1984 and 1999; 2) the growth in wealth...

This paper uses the data gained from an income categorization experiment for five shapes of income distributions to investigate background context effects, relative deprivation, range-frequency theory to explain back-ground context effects,individual income satisfaction versus aggregate...

With all the talk in Europe about “Islam” and “Muslim culture” it is surprising how little hard-core empirical evidence exists on the compatibility of “Muslim culture” with positive patterns of political, social, and ecological development in the world system in the 1980s, 1990s, and...

Theoretical study identifying one modality with conditions necesary for the financial stabilization of an inherently unstable system; and 5040 other unstable dynamic modes. It draws on knowledge made available by the academic field of Control Engineering.

This paper studies a closed economy with a continuum of agents and moral hazard. Economic agents in the economy operate a stochastic production technology with capital and labor inputs in which the latter is private information. I characterize efficient allocations of capital, labor, and...