This paper examines how a metropolitan area's job growth affects its income distribution. The research uses annual Current Population Survey data on the income distribution in different metropolitan areas from 1979 through 1988. Faster metropolitan job growth increases real family income in the...

Using panel data on U.S. MSAs, this paper estimates how a typical MSA's wages of different demographic groups, and prices, are affected by overall MSA unemployment, the distribution of unemployment among different groups, and national prices and wages. MSA unemployment has strong effects on MSA...

Inner-city business development is often proposed as a solution to inner-city poverty. However, research evidence suggests that creating new jobs in the inner city is unlikely by itself to significantly increase the employment or earnings of the inner city poor. Public subsidies for inner city...

The severe economic crisis affecting Greece is widely expected to have a significant social impact in terms of greater inequality and increased poverty. We provide an early assessment of whether (and to what extent) this is the case. More specifically, we distinguish between two inter-related...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether policy reforms in Austria between 1998 and 2005 were successful in meeting redistributive objectives and in reducing poverty. For the analysis we use the tax/benefit micro-simulation model EUROMOD. Due to the sequence of reforms and the use of two...

By increasing the labor supply of welfare recipients, welfare reform may reduce wages and increase unemployment among other less-educated groups. These "spillover effects" are difficult to estimate because welfare caseloads decrease in response to improvements in the economy, which leads...

Fiscal welfare, i.e. the use of the tax system to achieve social policy goals, is assuming ever greater importance throughout Europe and beyond. In housing, the favourable tax treatment of mortgage interest repayments has often coexisted alongside public programmes of housing benefit or social...

Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we show that the COVID-19 pandemic led to a loss of aggregate real labor earnings of more than $250 billion between March and July 2020. By exploiting the panel structure of the CPS, we show that the decline in aggregate earnings was entirely...