In this paper we describe and explain country differences in the effect of gender on the risk to become poor, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study on 22 industrialized countries. Although in most countries women are more likely to become poor than men, this is not the case for all...

This paper examines variation in old-age income inequality between industrialized nations with modern welfare systems. The analysis of income inequality across countries with different retirement income systems provides a perspective on public pension policy choices and designs and their...

A number of distributions have been used to describe income distribution. This paper estimates eleven distributions (GB, GB1, GB2, B, B1, B2, GG, BR3, BR12, GA, and LN) using data from eight countries (Australia, Canada, Israel, Norway, Russia, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States) for...

Public finance of post-compulsory education modifies substantially the supply of educational qualifications. Such modification has crucial implications for the long-term income distribution processes: in a context of sustained increases of demand for educational qualifications (brought about by...

The paper investigates the effectiveness of the median voter as a decisive agent in the process of redistribution. According to the previous literature, it tests several assumptions finding interesting results: The positive relation between inequality and redistribution is confirmed, but the...

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 starting point in the paper is the relative concept of poverty. We will study how our picture of poverty will change if we accept a very relative concept of poverty. The first problem we encountered was the selection of the benchmark. A couple of alternative ways to conduct relativizations...

Redistribution is one of the principal mechanisms through which countries secure low income inequality. Maintaining moderately high wage levels at the low end of the distribution may be increasingly difficult and perhaps even counterproductive from an egalitarian perspective. If so,...

There is confusion in the literature concerning the relationship between income inequality and redistribution in a cross-country perspective. The reason for this is that different contributions in the literature are not referring to the same characteristic. This is shown by addressing...

Cross-national research on the causes and consequences of income inequality has been hindered by the limitations of existing inequality datasets: greater coverage across countries and over time is available from these sources only at the cost of significantly reduced comparability across...