Distributions of many variables of interest in developed economic and financial markets, including income and wealth, exhibit heavy tails as in the case of Pareto or power laws. Many commonly used income and wealth inequality measures are very sensitive to extremes and outliers generated by...

Income inequality has been on the rise in many industrialised countries since around the 1980's. In Sweden the increase of income inequality has been particularly large. This in spite of Sweden's extensive redistribution system and public policy that prioritize equality among its population....

This study assesses whether recent changes in family structure and female employment patterns have altered the distribution of income in some countries. Extant literature on this topic reaches inconsistent conclusions and overwhelmingly focuses on the United States. To address these...

The link between income inequality and governmental redistribution is still subject to intense research and debate. Starting with the median-voter-hypothesis, a plethora of theoretical models have been developed during the last three decades to identify and explain possible causal relationships....

The continuous decline in the fertility rate has been witnessed since 1980 in Japan. Japan's total fertility rate in 2005 is 1.32, which is far below the replacement rate, 2.08. One of the main reasons for declining the fertility rate is the delay in marriage or even shy away from marriage among...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a...

This thesis is an empirical investigation of the relationship between income inequality and redistribution and their impact on the poorest segment of population. It is examined by two models in which we use transformed Gini coefficient as a measure of income inequality and sharegain (difference...

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction in the extent of redistributive fiscal policies if the maximal tolerable size of government has...

This paper addresses two major limitations of cross-national research on electoral support for extreme right parties (ERPs) in Western Europe: its almost exclusive focus on national-level data and its failure to examine the role of the social welfare state and social capital. We employ Tobit I...

Current studies addressing the rise in inequality confine themselves to country-level developments. This paper delineates trends in earnings inequality and employment at the sectoral level for eight LIS countries between 1985-2005. Earnings inequality mainly manifests itself within rather than...