There is a presumption that when an individual's comparison of his income with the incomes of others in his comparison group yields an unfavorable outcome, the individual is dismayed and experiences stress that impinges negatively on his health. In a recent study, Hounkpatin et al. (2016)...

U.S. income inequality has risen dramatically in recent decades. Researchers consistently find that greater income inequality measured at the state or national level is associated with diminished subjective well-being (SWB) in the U.S. We conduct the first multi-scale analysis (i.e., at the...

This paper analyzes the microeconomic sources of wage inequality in the United States from 1967-2012. Decomposing inequality into factors categorized by degree of personal responsibility, we find that education is able to explain more than twice as much of inequality today as 45 years ago....

Estimates of UK income inequality trends differ substantially according to whether estimates are based on household survey data (used for official statistics) or tax return data (used in the top incomes literature). We reconcile differences in variable definitions and combine survey and tax...

We provide the first survey-based look at levels and trends in income and its distribution from 1959 to 2016 by linking Current Population Survey data from 1967 through 2016 with decennial Census data for 1959. We find that the dramatic decline in the market income of the middle class (measured...

This paper is an application of a new Shapley income decomposition methodology, in which we isolate two subjective factors in income differences - race and gender - that contribute to income inequality within the population of blacks and whites in the United States over the period 2005-2017. We...

From 2010 to 2019, personal earnings inequality declined in the United States (U.S.) for the first time in decades, yet household income inequality continued to increase. Discordance between trends in personal earnings inequality and household income inequality was greater than in any other...

The evolution of the ratio of direct taxation (characterized by progressive rates) over indirect and payroll taxation (characterized by flat rates) is examined together with its distributional consequences for the Bottom 50%, Middle 40% and Top 10% shares of income. Oscillations of this ratio...

Using internal and public use March Current Population Survey data, we analyze trends in US income inequality (19752004). Using a multiple imputation approach where values for censored observations are imputed using draws from a Generalized Beta distribution of the Second Kind, we find that the...