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...

This note tests whether the extraordinary rise in Spanish unemployment in the 1980s can be traced back to rigidities in the wage structure in the face of relative net demand shocks against the unskilled (this claim is also known as the 'Krugman hypothesis'). I can establish that youth...

This study examines how the distribution of income across persons, regions, countries and larger geographical areas in the EU has changed in the dawn of the enlargement of the EU. It focuses especially on the effects of trade liberalization, the welfare states and the regional cohesion policy...

With the current economic transformation, the widening gap between income and the accumulation of wealth becomes an important area of study. This study reviews wage differentials and a number of economic theories regarding wage determination and labor market incentives. To analyze the wage...

The recent debate on trends in inequality in industrial countries has been marred by the lack of consensus about the relevant concept of inequality. Labour economists are concerned with inequality in earnings, macroeconomists with movements in the wage share, while policy-makers tend to focus on...

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...

EU-TE trade is increasingly characterized by intra-industry trade. For some countries (Czech Republic), the share of intra-industry trade in total trade with the EU approaches 60 percent. The decomposition of intra-industry trade into horizontal and vertical shares reveals overwhelming vertical...

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...

The reformulation of the median voter hypothesis and its testing proposed in Milanovic (2000) has been criticized from four different perspectives. The critiques are discussed and assessed.

Based on the standard axiom of individual utility maximization, rational choice has postulated that higher income inequality translates into greater redistribution by shaping the median voter's preferences. While numerous papers have tested this proposition, the literature has remained divided...