Recent literature has suggested many ways of measuring equality of opportunity. We analyze in a systematic manner the various approaches put forth in the literature to show whether and to what extent different choices matter empirically. We use EU-SILC data for most European countries for 2005...

The accumulation of the human capital stock plays a key role to explain the macroeconomic performance across regions. However, despite the strong theoretical support for this claim, empirical evidence has been not very convincing, probably because of the low quality of the data. This paper...

The paper examines the degree of overlap between people who experience chronic material deprivation and those who face long term income poverty (longitudinal poverty) in 22 EU countries for the period 2005-2008, using the longitudinal information of the EU-SILC. In order to approximate chronic...

We provide a critique of the standard methodology which bases welfare comparisons between households on deflating household income and consumption by an equivalence scale. We argue that this leads to support for tax/transfer policies that significantly disadvantage low to middle income...

Using two time-diary data sets each for Germany, Italy the Netherlands and the U.S. from 1985-2003, we demonstrate that Americans work more than Europeans: 1) in the market; 2) in total (market and home production)-- there is no one-for-one tradeoff across countries in total work; 3) at unusual...

Gender wage and employment gaps are negatively correlated across countries. We argue that non-random selection of women into work explains an important part of such correlation and thus of the observed variation in wage gaps. The idea is that, if women who are employed tend to have relatively...