Mobility of top incomes matters for both the openness of the income elite and the share of total income that this group receives. It is thus an important complement information to the growing snapshot literature on top income concentration. I use microlevel panel data of German income tax files...

Using a factor decomposition of the Gini coefficient we measure the contribution to inequality of direct monetary income flows to and from the Brazilian State. The income flows from the State include public servants' earnings, Social Security pensions, unemployment benefits and Social Assistance...

This paper develops a criterion of opportunity equalization, that is consistent with theoretical views of equality of opportunity. Our analysis rests on the characterization of inequality of opportunity as a situation where some groups in society enjoy an illegitimate advantage. In this context,...

This paper looks at the association between wage satisfaction and different notions of reference wage, based on a matched employer-employee dataset. It shows that workers’ satisfaction depends on other-people’s income in different ways. Relative income concerns are important, but we also...

A widely accepted criterion for pro-poorness of an income growth pattern is that it should reduce a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equiproportionately. Inequality reduction is not generally seen as either necessary or sufficient for pro-poorness. As shown in...

Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which...

Households can differ in size and needs. A reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population. Ebert and Moyes (2003) and Shorrocks (2004) theoretically explore the properties...

The aim of this paper is to provide some empirical evidence about black-white differentials in the distribution of income and wellbeing in three different countries: Brazil, US and South Africa. In all cases, people of African descent are in a variety of ways socially disadvantaged compared with...

In this paper, a new class of polarization measures is derived axiomatically. The concept of polarization is here identified with the decline of the middle class. In particular, we extend the definition of middle class towards a more realistic framework: the middle class is defined in terms of...