This paper shows that higher levels of perceived wage inequality are associated with a weaker (stronger) belief into meritocratic (non-meritocratic) principles as being important in determining individual wages. This finding is robust to the use of an instrumental-variable estimation strategy...

We show that a recent appendix to the Gini-coefficient to make the latter more sensitive to asymmetric income distributions can be viewed as an abstract measure of skewness. We develop some of its properties and apply it to the US-income distribution in 1974 and 2010

In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian during 1967-2000. We find that the substantial...

The Gini coefficient is based on the sum of pairwise income differences. For an individual, differences vis-à-vis poorer people represent advantage, and those versus richer people deprivation. Any weighted average of deprivation and advantage generates a “Gini admissible” personal...

Over the last decades, research in behavioural economics has demonstrated that individual welfare (utility), as relevant for economic decision making, depends not only on absolut but also on distributional aspects. Moreover, evidence is gathering that something similar holds for aggregate...

In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian during 1967-2000. We find that the substantial...

Income inequality in Germany has been continuously increasing during the past 20 years. In general, this is understood as an increase in inequality of wages due to changes in bargaining power of employees. However, the role of changing household structure is widely neglected. Societal trends...

Are competitive mechanisms perceived as just sources of economic inequality? Perceptions of fairness violations can have severe economic consequences, as they may cause counterproductive behavior such as rule book slowdowns or quality shading. To analyze fairness perceptions associated with...

Both buyers and sellers of goods and services may benefit from letting their economic transactions go unrecorded for tax purposes. The supplier reduces his tax burden by underreporting income, whereas the consumer gains from buying a non-taxed lower-priced product. The distributional...

This paper re-examines the link between globalization and income inequality. We use data for 140 countries over the period 1970-2014 and employ an IV approach to deal with the endogeneity of globalization measures. We find that the link between globalization and income inequality differs across...