As far as standard measures of income inequality are concerned, the Nordic countries rank among the most equal economies in the world. This paper studies whether and how this picture changes when the focus is on inequality of income composition, meaning the heterogeneity in individuals' factor...

The link between income inequality and governmental redistribution is still subject to intense research and debate. Starting with the median-voter-hypothesis, a plethora of theoretical models have been developed during the last three decades to identify and explain possible causal relationships....

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 openness to international trade and capital movements of industrialized countries has increased substantially during the recent decades. At the same time, most of these countries experienced a rise in income dispersion. Against this background, the paper analyzes empirically whether the...

This paper uses national accounts data to adjust market and disposable Top 10% and Top 1% household survey income shares for 39 developed and developing countries that are part of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). An additional novelty of this study is the distinction between labor and capital...

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...

This study examines empirically the impact of income polarization on economic growth in an unbalanced panel of more than 70 countries during the 1960-2005 period. We calculate various polarization indices using existing micro-level datasets, as well as datasets reconstructed from grouped data on...