This paper examines the relationship between the distribution of average annual household pre-tax earnings and average annual household hours of market work for married couple households. The point of departure in this paper is the treatment of the variation in annual hours worked either over...

In a search for determinants of societal levels of income inequality, scholars have suggested that homogamy within marriages and cohabiting relationships is a potentially important driver of inequality. If resourceful persons form couples together, and individuals without resources partner each...

Based on the earlier work of one of the authors, this paper develops a unified methodology to compare tax progression for dominance relations under different income distributions. We address it as uniform tax progression for different income distributions and present the respective approach for...

We examine the poverty rates and the income configurations among Japan and the LIS countries. The LIS countries are Germany, Italy, the UK, Denmark, the US, and Taiwan. We divide household including elderly into five types: living alone, couples only, living with their married children, living...

The jackknife is a resampling method that uses subsets of the original database by leaving out one observation at a time from the sample. The paper outlines a procedure to obtain jackknife estimates for several inequality indices with only a few passes through the data. The number of passes is...

Substantial cross-national differences in poverty alleviation are well documented, but theextent to which different parts of the social transfer system account for this variation is still relatively unexamined. This study analyses the redistributive effects of specific social policy institutions...

Germany has lower posttax income inequality than the United States and hence is doing better according to a strict egalitarian fairness ideal. On the other hand, the United States is doing better than Germany according to a libertarian fairness ideal, which states that people should be held...

This paper examines income inequality over stages of the later-life course (age 45 and older) and systems that can be used to mitigate this inequality. Two hypotheses are tested: Levels of income inequality decline during old age because public benefits are more equally distributed than work...

Welfare state supporters typically contend that social-welfare programs boost the incomes of low-earning households. Critics argue that, over time, such programs reduce the growth of economic output and/or employment. As a result, redistribution may produce stagnant or even declining real...

Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of 'temporal autonomy': the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life....