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...

Recent work on inequality has examined either changes in the distribution of income or in that of earnings, without examining how the latter affects the former. In this paper we perform a factor decomposition of income inequality in order to assess the importance of earnings and income from...

The One Parameter Inequality Process (OPIP) long predates the Saved Wealth Model (SWM) to which it is isomorphic up to a different choice of stochastic driver of wealth exchange. Both are stochastic interacting particle system intended to model wealth and income distribution. The OPIP and other...

In discussions on inequality in Africa, Mali often appears as an exception, being the country with the lowest level of inequality in the West African sub-region. In this paper, we analyse the dynamics of inequality in the country and try to understand the role played by the different sources of...

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,...

The aim of this paper is to offer an overview of the many opportunities the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data set provides to measure the distributive effect of taxes and transfers in the developed countries. Two specific tasks are undertaken. First, and most important, the paper offers a...

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...

Inequality has been an increasingly prominent object of study among comparativists. We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine household market inequality, redistribution, and the relationship between market inequality and redistribution in affluent OECD countries in the 1980s and...

While many nations lay a claim to supporting 'family values', these values may be interpreted in a variety of ways. How do nations support families, particularly families with children? What strategies do different nations take, and how do these strategies lead to different outcomes? In this...

In this article we use the high-quality data coming from the Luxembourg Income Study Project, in a panel framework, to test for the effects of electoral systems on both poverty and income inequality. We find that when de degree of proportionality of an electoral system increases, inequality and...