This paper attempts to bridge the gap between previous cross-national work estimating rates of return to education and the current trend toward examining rates over time. Changes in the returns to education in the 1980s over five countries were driven by different forces across the countries.

This paper examines how far Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have achieved gender equality in earnings. These Nordic countries are contrasted with Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s, and include some comparisons to the situation in the 1980s. While all these...

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...