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...

This paper develops methods for decomposing changes in the income distribution using subgroup decompositions of the income density function. Overall changes are related to changes in subgroup shares and changes in subgroup densities, where the latter are broken down further using elementary...

We examine the dynamic evolution of incomes, both disposable and gross, for several groups in the PSID panel data at several points from 1968 to 1997. We employ the extended Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests of First and Second Order Stochastic Dominance (SD) as implemented by Maasoumi and Heshmati...

This review covers a range of measures and methods frequently employed in empirical analysis of global income inequality and global income distribution. Different determinant factors along with quantification of their impacts and empirical results from different case studies are presented. These...

Income inequality can be measured at different levels of aggregation such as global, continental, international and national levels. Here we consider income inequality at regions defined as equivalent of continental and sub-continental levels. We investigate the economic disparity between...

In Germany, two observations can be made over the past 20 years: First, income inequality has been constantly increasing while, second, the average household size has been declining dramatically. The analysis of income distribution relies on equivalence-weighted incomes which take into account...

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...

This paper provides unprecedented direct evidence from large-scale survey data on both the intensity (how much?) and direction (to whom?) of income comparisons. Income comparisons are considered to be at least somewhat important by three-quarters of Europeans. They are associated with both lower...

Using four rounds (1999, 2002, 2005, 2008) of the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS), this article examines determinants of household income and consumption levels and inequalities. Unconditional as well as conditional stochastic dominance (SD) tests are performed by year, by household...