Working-age Americans work longer hours than adults in other industrialized countries. At the same time, the United States. has one of the least equal income distributions of any rich country. This paper provides a cross-national analysis of the impact of the exceptional U.S. income distribution...

The objective of this paper is to distinguish between different types of working poverty, on the basis of the mechanisms that produce it. Whereas the poverty literature identifies a myriad of risk factors and of categories of disadvantaged workers, we focus on three immediate causes of working...

The recent EU expansion raised fears of potential migration motivated by welfare receipt. In this paper we use comparable data from five countries - Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Norway and the U.S. - to ask whether immigrants benefit more from social support than natives. Looking at the European...

Most cross-country comparisons of living standards focus on real Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) adjusted Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person. These measures provide no variance in living standards within the nation, nor do they account for the amount of real incomes that families actually...

The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and the databases underlying the European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) allow estimates of the extent to which immigrant and nonimmigrant children are poor across a wide range of rich nations. These data also allow estimates of the effects...

It is well established that class and gender predict occupational placement across advanced industrialized countries. In exploratory analyses the authors document a third dimension to occupational segregation associated with family responsibilities, and consider explanations for cross- national...

We use Luxembourg Income Study data to compare the progressivity of the tax structure in the U.S. and Europe. While our study supports the arguments of other scholars that the US has more progressive taxes than the continental or social democratic countries, we also present the following...

This paper summarizes the recent literature on income distribution in European nations drawing on some of the material used in the OECD project report (see above) and additional new material.

Problems of the systems for protecting the elderly have become pressing on a world wide scale albeit for different reasons. In many industrialized countries with mature systems the share of GDP that is redistributed via the mandatory pension system is criticized as being too high. High...

This paper presents stylized facts about the effect of children on household disposable income and its components (the 'income package') in nine OECD countries, employing data from the Luxembourg Income Study database. We find that cross-national differences in the impact of children on...