This paper investigates whether the individual misperception of income distributions helps explain why, opposite to Meltzer and Richard (1981), higher initial inequality levels do not correlate positively with redistribution. I conduct a representative survey experiment in Brazil, France,...

The paper uses a veil of ignorance approach and income distribution data of developed countries to arrive at inequality corrected income rankings. While a risk neutral individual (based on year 2000 data) would have preferred to be born into the US rather than any European country in our sample...

In the distributive analysis, the constant relative inequality aversion utility function is a standard tool for ethical judgements of income distributions. The sole parameter ε of this function expresses a society’s aversion to inequality. However, the profession has not committed to the...

Aggregate data shows an inverse relationship between female employment and income inequality. This paper investigates this relationship using micro-data for seventeen OECD countries. In all countries, female earnings exert an equalising force on the distribution of income in spite of large...

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...

The match between perception and reality can depend on many different elements across societies over time, but subjective and objective dimensions are both relevant particularly in social class analysis. The aim of this paper is to investigate perceived social position and income inequality in...

The paper aims to encompass evidence on wage distribution and inequality with micro-mobility measures for several countries in the 2000s, by applying pseudo-panel methodology to microdata from the LIS database. Hence, different paths in term of wage growth or stagnation, increasing or declining...

The relationship between income inequality and polarization is an empirical fact: a change in equality might occur together with a change in polarization. At the same time, polarization might emerge while inequality remains constant. The outcome of this process entails relevant information about...

This paper introduces in statistics the notion of the barycenter of the distribution of a non-negative random variable Y with a positive finite mean μY and the quantile function Q(x). The barycenter is denoted by μX and defined as the expected value of the random variable X having the...