As massive rural residents leave their home countryside for better employment, migration has profound effects on income distributions such as rural-urban income gap and inequalities within rural or urban areas. The nature of the effects depends crucially on who are migrating and their migrating...

We study spatial changes in labour market inequality for US states and MSAs using Census and American Community Survey data between 1980 and 2010. We report evidence of significant spatial variations in education employment shares and in the college wage premium for US states and MSAs, and show...

Mexican wage inequality rose following Mexico's accession to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization in 1986. Since the mid-1990s, however, wage inequality has been falling. Since most trade models suggest that output prices can affect factor prices, this paper...

We analyze poverty dynamics in Europe for the periods 1994‐2001 and 2005‐2008 using, respectively, the data of the ECHP and the EU‐SILC. We focus on poverty profiles depicting poverty duration, recurrence and persistence and, then, on the trigger events (income, demographic, labour market)...

Ethnic and religious differentials in labour market outcomes within many countries have been remarkably persistent. Yet one very well-known differential – the Catholic/Protestant unemployment differential in Northern Ireland – has largely (although not completely) disappeared. This paper...

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...

This paper investigates to what extent the tax and transfer systems in Europe protect households at different income levels against losses in current income caused by economic downturns like the present financial crisis. We use a multi country micro simulation model to analyse how shocks on...