This paper studies on the determinants of income and urban-rural income gap to shed light on the problem of urban-rural income inequality in China. OLS, conditional quantile regression and Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition methods are used to analyze four waves of the China Health and Nutrition...

The main goal of this paper is to document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the four largest European economies (France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy). Relative IOp represents an important portion of total income inequality, with values ranging from...

This paper is concerned with the question of whether top income earners are permanently there or only temporarily receive the highest incomes. How much mobility is there at the top of the income distribution, and how has mobility changed over time? The paper makes both a methodological and an...

We study the role of occupational tasks as drivers of West German wage inequality. We match administrative wage data with longitudinal task data, which allows us to account for within-occupation changes in task content over time. We run RIF regression-based decompositions to quantify the...

Harmonised microdata show a Gini coefficient for per capita total income of 45.3 percent in China 2002 and 33.6 percent in Russia 2003. A much larger urban to rural income gap in combination with a much smaller proportion of people living in urban areas in China are important reasons for this...

While some workers in China attain senior professional level and senior cadre level status (Chuzhang and above), others attain middle rank including middle rank of professional and cadre (Kezhang). This aspect of the Chinese labor force has attracted surprisingly little attention in the...

This paper studies differences in inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences between East and West Germany. As expected, there are substantial differences with respect to all three of these measures. Surprisingly, however, differences in distributional norms are...

We investigate the effects of inequality in wealth on the incentives to contribute to a public good when agents are inequity averse and may differ in ability. We show that equality may lead to a reduction of public good provision below levels generated by purely selfish agents. But introducing...

Equality of opportunity is an ethical goal with almost universal appeal. The interpretation taken here is that a society has achieved equality of opportunity if it is the case that what individuals accomplish, with respect to some desirable objective, is determined wholly by their choices and...