Societies typically have three objectives for work and welfare: sustained income/economic growth per capita, employment growth (and job security?), a just distribution of income along with access to certain basic services. There may be tensions between these objectives. This paper tries to...

In this paper, we provide evidence that reconciles the co-existence of high income mobility among people on low income and patterns of high persistence on income support among people whose income from government payments is low – both phenomena have been founded in different Australian...

The paper computes lifetime welfare functions for French and American workers. For the vast majority of workers, we find that the lifetime discrepancy between the welfare of an employed and that of an unemplyed worker appear to quite similar in the two countries, corresponding to nine monthly...

This paper considers an economy where inequality originates from exogenous `talent' or `market luck' shocks and is transmitted over time by the same saving decisions that determine the aggregate rate of accumulation. The resulting interactions between factor- and personal-income distribution are...

The rise in inequality and poverty is one of the most important economic and social issues in recent times. But in contrast to the literature on individual earnings inequality, there has been little work modelling (as opposed to documenting) household income dynamics. This is largely because of...

This Paper explores the implications of the recent sharp rise in US wage inequality for welfare and the cross-sectional distributions of hours worked, consumption and earnings. From 1967 to 1996 cross-sectional dispersion of earnings increased more than wage dispersion, due to a rise in the...

This Paper analyses the persistence of poverty in Sweden using a hazard rate model based on multiple spells. The model also accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and possibly endogenous initial conditions. We estimate the model on a large representative Swedish panel dataset, LINDA, for the...

In considering the economic impacts of climatic changes, economists frequently use annual national income as a proxy for social welfare. I show that such studies suffer from a significant bias, arising from the fact that such models typically ignore changes in mortality rates. Using panel data...