In most OECD countries the gap between rich and poor has widened over the past decades. This paper analyzes whether and to what extent taxes and social transfers have contributed to this trend. Has the redistributive power of different social programs changed over time? The paper contributes to...

Using observational micro data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we assess the redistributive impact of tax and transfer configurations across 22 OECD countries for the period 1999-2013. After recovering new tax data (employer social contributions), we measure the reduction of income...

This paper offers an overview of income inequality and government redistribution between the late 1960s and 2010 in 20 developed countries. Our primary data source is household-level income surveys available from the Luxembourg Income Study Database (LIS). These data allow us to measure overall...

Prior empirical studies have found that American workers report longer hours than workers in other highly industrialized countries, and that the highly educated report the longest hours relative to other educational levels. This paper analyzes disparities in working hours by gender and education...

This paper updates and extends my earlier work (published in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues on how the middle class fares throughout the world. Wave #6 data from the Luxembourg Income Study, recently released and centered around 2004, provides an opportunity to assess what...

In this paper I theoretically show that if the self-employed evade income taxes, then the choice of being self-employed is more sensitive to the tax rates on wages than to tax rates on income from self-employment. Using variation in the statutory tax rates across countries, industries, and...

Most methods for the analysis of distributional change rely on the changes in the income of a particular group of people, taking either the situation of this group in the previous period, or the average change in the population, as reference point. By contrast, we propose a measure of...

This short essay examines the proposition that the transition process to a capitalist economic system in Eastern and Central European nations has introduced greater income inequality than in long-time capitalist nations at similar stages of development. In the empirical analysis I use comparable...

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...