This paper explores the sources of variation in state redistribution across 13 developed democracies over the 1979-2000 period, drawing upon data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the Luxembourg Income Study and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems....

We use a range of data sources to assess if, and to what extent, government redistribution policies have slowed or accelerated the trend towards greater income disparities in the past 20-25 years. In most countries, inequality among 'non-elderly' households has widened during most phases of the...

According to the 'median-voter' hypothesis, greater inequality in the market distribution of earnings or income tends to produce greater generosity in redistributive policy. We outline the steps in the causal chain specified by the hypothesis and attempt to assess these steps empirically. Prior...

We test the hypothesis that more progressive redistribution contributes to emission reductions with the aid of fixed-effects estimation technique. Using a panel of 16 West European countries over the period 1990-00, we regress emission levels of four different air pollutants on two alternative...

The traditional way of measuring government redistribution across countries is to compare the income households report that they receive from private sources with the income they receive after government transfers have been added and taxes and social insurance contributions deducted....

This paper examines inequality patterns in the 1990s in Poland, Russia and Hungary. We consider three different definitions of income and analyse the contributions to inequality of their main components using LIS micro data. Inequality is measured using the Gini and Theil indices, which in turn...

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...

Based on the earlier work of one of the authors, this paper develops a unified methodology to compare tax progression for dominance relations under different income distributions. We address it as uniform tax progression for different income distributions and present the respective approach for...

Our study extends research on the feminization of poverty by analyzing the variation in women's, men's and feminized poverty across affluent democracies from 1969 to 2000. Specifically, we address three issues. First, we provide more recent estimates of adult women's and men's poverty and the...