Inequality, bi-polarization and polarization are related but distinct concepts aiming at analysing the income distribution. This paper first recalls the main differences between these three notions of inequality, bipolarization and polarization. It then shows that a close look at the impact of...

Despite the formal rigour that attends social and economic measurement, the substantive meaning of particular measures could be compromised in the absence of a clear and coherent conceptualization of the phenomenon being measured. A case in point is afforded by the status of a focus axiom in the...

Two conversion schemes are usually employed for assessing personal-income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, the authors show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion...

Subgroup decomposability is a very useful property in an inequality measure, and level-sensitivity, which requires a given level of inequality to acquire a greater significance the poorer a population is, is a distributionally appealing axiom for an inequality index to satisfy. In this paper,...

The occupational skill structure depends on the business cycle if employers respond to shortages of applicants during upturns by lowering their hiring standards. The notion and relevance of hiring standards adjustment was advanced by Reder and investigated formally in a search-theoretic...

The labour markets in the developed countries have experienced two fundamental changes in recent years. Firstly, high-skilled workers have gained at the expense of low-skilled workers, which manifests itself in a rising skill premium and/or a rising disparity in the unemployment rates of these...

This paper examines the movements in EU unemployment from two perspectives: (a) the NRU/NAIRU perspective, in which unemployment movements are attributed largely to changes in the long-run equilibrium unemployment rate and (b) the chain-reaction perspective, in which unemployment movements are...

A widely spread belief among economists is that monetary policy has relatively short-lived effects on real variables such as unemployment. Previous studies indicate that monetary policy affects the output gap only at business cycle frequencies, but the effects on unemployment may well be more...

The link between trade and wages is embodied in the Stolper-Samuelson theorem and its generalizations. The Stolper-Samuelson logic is that trade affects relative factor rewards by changing relative prices. Since in Argentina non-skilled labor was neither as abundant a factor as land nor as...