This article uses a unique panel data set of rural El Salvador to investigate the main sources of persistence and variability in incomes. Our econometric framework validly reduces a general panel model to a dynamic linear model with a covariance structure that can be estimated efficiently with...

This article is an overview of income inequality trends during the 1980s and 1990s and a discussion of their challenges to redistribution policies in Japan. The key results are summarized as follows. First, a widening disparity in market income for the working-age population has been driving...

This article examines inequality and poverty among older people in Japan. It compares Japan with that of a sample of other OECD countries. Provisions within the social insurance system that enable old-age pensioners to work and draw incomes from labor explain some of the inequality and poverty...

In Japanese society, changes in the employment patterns of the youth, particularly the increase in non-regular employment, have the potential to widen income disparities in the future. These potential income disparities are hidden because the youth who are not engaged in regular employment...

This paper studies the relation between macroeconomic variables and the distribution of income in Colombia. We relate the dynamics of aggregate economic variables with the cross-section of disaggregate income to determine the transmission and propagation mechanisms of aggregate shocks. The most...

In this paper I use the Malmö Longitudinal Data set and calculate actual lifetime earnings for the 1928 cohort of Malmö men. I compare distributions of, and the educational wage premiums for, annual and lifetime earnings. The distribution of lifetime earnings is found to be less than the...

Income replacement after retirement is an increasingly important economic policy area of social concern. This study examines three different measures of replacement income, including the effect of taxes on the estimated replacement rates of new retirees in the Health and Retirement Study. An...

The present study attempts to explain the difference in observed earning inequality between self-employment and wage-employment in Switzerland in 1992, 1995 and 2000. We use several measures of inequality in order both to determine the factors affecting income dispersion in the two groups and to...

Are those in poverty likely to remain there or can they move out of this situation without help from other sources? Our understanding of those in or near poverty is primarily based upon the analysis of either annual income or the income distribution from cross-sectional survey data. It has been...

We investigate under which conditions it is possible to infer the evolution of poverty at the individual level from the knowledge of poverty among households. Poverty measurement is approached by the poverty orderings introduced by Foster and Shorrocks (1988). The analysis is based on a reduced...