Using a micro-level approach to poverty traps, this paper explores welfare dynamics among households in post-war rural Mozambique. Conceptually, the paper builds on an asset-based approach to poverty and tests empirically, with household panel data, for the existence of a poverty trap. Findings...

Two conversion schemes are usually employed for assessing personal-income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs.Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and...

Standard household economics assumes that couples pool their incomes and share the sum equally, which is a necessary prerequisite for computing equivalent incomes and hence all statements about the distribution of personal incomes and income poverty. However, since cohabitation without marriage...

Society drifts apart in many dimensions. Economists focus on income of the poor and rich and the distribution of income but a broader spectrum of dimensions is required to draw the picture of multiple facets of individual life. In our study of multidimensional polarization we extend the income...

The distribution of personal income in a society depends strongly on the within-household distribution of income. Nevertheless, little is known about this phenomenon. I analyze the sharing of income among household partners from a welfare economic perspective. Measures of financial satisfaction...

The definition and operationalization of wealth information in population surveys and the corresponding microdata requires a wide range of more or less normative assumptions. However, the decisions made in both the pre- and post-data-collection stage may interfere considerably with the...

Using representative income and time use-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from home production and analyse their impact on economic inequality. As an alternative to existing measures, we propose a predicted wage approach based...

We examine the impact of family income during childhood on the type of secondary school that German children attend, a good indicator of their lifetime socioeconomic attainment. By contrast with several US child outcome studies, we find that late-childhood income is a more important determinant...

In view of rising wage and income inequality, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.50 € per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts...

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on the role of time. We use panel data on 49,000 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2012 to uncover three empirical relationships. First, life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity...