The purpose of this paper is to compare the groups of the unemployed, low-paid workers and precarious/part-time workers; and their families' disposable incomes. Comparable data from three countries, i.e. Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom is used.

Pension reforms have been on the political agenda of governments and of international organisations as the OECD and the World Bank for some time. However, the strengthening of private elements in pension systems is often believed to intensify existing inequalities in the distribution of pensions...

In an age when there is considerable focus on the needs and rights of children, it is perhaps a little surprising that parental income still mostly determines the standard of living that children enjoy. This has important implications, not just in terms of overall levels of welfare for children,...

Survey of Consumer Finances cross-sectional data from 1973 to 1996 are used in this article to examine Canadian trends in income inequality over the middle and later stages of the life course of a synthetic cohort born between 1922 and 1926. Using Gini coefficients, the findings show that income...

In this paper we examine the hours of paid work of husbands and wives in ten industrialized countries, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study. We present results on the average hours of paid work put in jointly by couples, on the proportion working very long weekly hours, and on gender...

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...

While more and more married women participate in paid work, men have not equalized the division of labor by appreciably increasing the time they devote to unpaid domestic tasks. The state can assist in managing this double time burden on women by enabling families to externalize a portion of it...

The main purpose of this study is to examine the extent of income inequality in Japan and to speculate on the extent of Japan's economic inequality in comparative perspective. This study focuses on Japanese income distribution and examines the trends from mid-1980s to late 1990s and comparison...

Three decades ago, Canada and the United States shared almost identical relative poverty and inequality levels. Yet despite experiencing similar macro-level social and economic transformations from 1974 to 1994 , the two nations have experienced diametrically opposite trends in relative...

The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) project is one of the oldest and best-known examples of crossnational social science infrastructure. Some 25 nations and 20 sponsors team together to provide internet accessible, privacy-protected, household income microdata to over 400 users in 30 nations. The...