The aim of this paper is not to supply a synthesis of the Chicago School human capital theory, but rather to define and analyze the earnings functions and their relations with the human capital concept. The earnings functions are an easy and flexible tool, for the analysis of the investments in...

The economics profession has made considerable progress in understanding the increase in wage inequality in the U.S. and the UK over the past several decades, but currently lacks a consensus on why inequality did not increase, or increased much less, in (continental) Europe over the same time...

I study the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience. Voters care more about the well-being of those belonging to their own group than the rest of the population. Within a model of political tax determination, both fractionalization and group antagonism reduce the support for...

For a long time conventional wisdom held that income inequality enhances investment and work incentives and thereby is good for economic growth. In the 1990s this view was turned on its head, as a number of empirical analyses found an association between inequality and slower growth across large...

This paper investigates wage gaps between part- and full-time women workers in six OECD countries in the mid-1990s. Using comparable micro-data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), for Canada, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and the US, the paper first assesses crossnational variation in the...

The recent resurgence of income inequality in some of the core societies has spawned a wide-ranging debate as to the culprits. Progress in this debate has been complicated by the fact that many of the theories that have been developed to account for the inequality upswing imply radically...

The purpose of this paper is twofold, partly exploratory; to determine the degree to which Rowntree's poverty cycles are still apparent among the most advanced industrial nations, and partly analytical; to examine how successful different sociopolitical strategies have been in eliminating...

We study the role of old-age pensions, disability insurance and healthcare in accounting for the differing labor supply patterns of older individuals across countries. We develop a life cycle model of labor supply and health with heterogeneous agents. In our framework, people choose when to stop...

This paper is on measuring the gap in returns to education between foreign-born and native workers in France, Germany, and Austria and investigates the extent to which this gap can be explained by a mis-match between the actual and the years of schooling typical for a given occupation. The...