The chapter examines how the various dimensions of economic inequality between men and women are analyzed today. Beyond the gender wage gap—a central issue—and of course the still far from equal sharing of housework, the chapter also reviews research on gender inequality in access to...

Considering the contribution of the distribution of individual wages and earnings to that of household incomes we find two separate literatures that should be brought together, and bring “new institutions” into play. Growing female employment, rising dual-earnership and part-time employment...

Studies of inequality often ignore resource allocation within the household. In doing so they miss an important element of the distribution of welfare that can vary dramatically depending on overall environmental and economic factors. Thus, measures of inequality that ignore intrahousehold...

This chapter provides a thorough survey of what recent international (i.e., cross-country) studies can tell us about the multiple causes of income inequality in the OECD area with regard to both levels and trends. The survey covers economics literature in particular but also relevant evidence...

We review the survey and experimental findings in the literature on attitudes to income inequality. We interpret the latter as any disparity in incomes between individuals. We classify these findings into two broad types of individual attitudes toward the income distribution in a society: the...

Like the other chapters in this volume of the Handbook of Income Distribution (and its predecessor), the aim of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of a particular area of research. We examine the literature on post-1970 trends in poverty and income inequality, up to 2010 or 2011...

This chapter discusses the formal and informal techniques that are commonly used to give quantitative answers in the field of distributional analysis. To this end, it covers subjects including inequality, poverty, and the modeling of income distributions. It also deals with parametric and...

This chapter reviews the basic conceptual foundations for the measurement of polarization, the origins of those foundations, how polarization is distinct from inequality and other ways of considering distances and differences across individuals, and how polarization can be measured in an...

Individual well-being depends not only on income but also on other dimensions of life, such as health, the quality of social relations and of the environment, employment, and job satisfaction. In this chapter we survey the economic literature on how to construct such overall measures of...