Using a VAR model of the American economy from 1984 to 2003, we find that, contrary to official claims, the Federal Reserve does not target inflation or react to inflation signals.ʺ Rather, the Fed reacts to the very realʺ signal sent by unemployment, in a way that suggests that a baseless...

This paper begins by proposing two cardinal measures of inequality in life chances. Using as its database a matrix in which the lines correspond to the social category of parents and the columns to the income distribution of their children, it then highlights the importance of the marginal...

This paper summarizes the background, type, logic, and working procedure of the statistical matching used in the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) project to combine the various data sets used to produce the synthetic data set with which the LIMEW is constructed. The authors...

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the approaches to poverty based on income and wealth that have been proposed in the literature. Two types of approaches are considered: those that look at income and wealth separately when defining the poverty frontier, and those in which these two...

This paper presents a review of the literature on the economics of shared societies. As defined by the Club de Madrid, shared societies are societies in which people hold an equal capacity to participate in and benefit from economic, political, and social opportunities regardless of race,...

This study estimates the impact of financial deregulation on top income shares. Using the novel econometric method of constructing synthetic control groups, we show that the "Big Bang"-deregulations in the United Kingdom in 1986 and Japan 1997-1999 increased the share of pre-tax incomes going to...

This paper presents new estimates of wealth inequality in Sweden during 2000-2012, linking wealth register data up to 2007 and individually capitalized wealth based on income and property tax registers for the period thereafter when a repeal of the wealth tax stopped the collection of individual...

The quality of match for each of four statistical matches used in the LIMEW estimates for France for 1989 and 2000 is described. The first match combines the 1992 Enquête sur les Actifs Financiers with the 1989-90 Enquête Budget de Famille (BDF). The second match combines the 1998 General...

Existing empirical schemas of class structure do not specify the capitalist class in an adequate manner. We propose a schema in which the specification of capitalist households is based on wealth thresholds. Individuals in noncapitalist households are assigned class locations based on their...

Gender differences have long been documented in earnings, employment opportunities, and time spent within the unpaid care economy. This paper joins the recent efforts in the economics literature on gender differences in asset ownership. Specifically, it investigates whether a gender-specific...