This paper challenges the view that the wage structure in West-Germany has remained stable throughout the 80s and 90s. Based on a 2 % sample of social security records, we show that wage inequality has increased in the 1980s, but only at the top of the distribution. In the early 1990s, wage...

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of log earnings among individuals into the part due to changes...

We revisit the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross-country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditures. When the size of the middle class increases (measured as the proportion of people...

It has been argued that a factor behind the decline in income inequality in Latin America in the 2000s was the educational upgrading of its labor force. Between 1990 and 2010, the proportion of the labor force in the region with at least secondary education increased from 40 to 60 percent....

Middle class values have long been perceived as drivers of social cohesion and growth. In this paper we investigate the relation between class (measured by the position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American...

We put together the different conceptual issues involved in measuring inequality of opportunity, discuss how these concepts have been translated into computable measures, and point out the problems and choices researchers face when implementing these measures. Our analysis identifies and...

A large empirical literature documents a rise in wage inequality in the American economy. It is silent on whether the increase in inequality is due to greater heterogeneity in the components of earnings that are predictable by agents or whether it is due to greater uncertainty faced by agents....

Sibling correlations are used as overall measures of the impact of family background and community influences on individual outcomes. While most correlation studies show that siblings are quite similar in terms of future achievement, we lack specific knowledge of what it is about family...

We compare male and female upward labor income mobility in Germany and the United States using the GSOEP-PSID Cross National Equivalent File. Our main interest is to test whether a glass ceiling exists for women. The standard glass ceiling hypothesis highlights the belief that the playing field...