This paper measures high medical expenses in ten developed countries, both overall and by income and age, providing some of the best evidence to date on the extent of high medical spending across and within countries. Using comparable household-level data on out-of pocket (OOP) medical...

Health care policy seeks to ensure that citizens are protected against excessive out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses. Yet rising health care costs are pressuring private and social insurance schemes to shift toward more cost-sharing measures. This paper uses household surveys from seven countries to...

As health care costs rise, so too does the importance of assessing their incidence, and factoring these costs into measures of post-government income distribution. This paper contributes to this assessment by calculating the effect of government policy on the distribution of income by adjusting...

There is a wide agreement among poverty research community that conventional estimates of poverty (i.e., money-metric measures) do not take into account out of pocket payments of health care. Significant household health spending would overestimate total household expenditure, which results in...

Objective: This paper measures large out-of-pocket expenses by health condition, income, and elderly status, and estimates changes in them between 2010 and 2013. Data Source: The paper uses nationally-representative household survey data. Study Design: Logistic regression estimates the...

Over the last three decades, the wealth-to-income ratio (WIR) in many Western countries, particularly in Europe and North America, increased by a factor of two. This represents a defining empirical trend: a rewealthization (from the French repatrimonialisation) – or the comeback of (inherited)...

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...

This article studies global distributions of capital and labor income among individuals in 2000 and 2016. By constructing a novel database covering approximately the 80% of the global output and the 60% of the world population, two major findings stand out. First, the world underwent a...

Emerging evidence suggests that COVID-19 has amplified existing gender divisions that disadvantage women. What is the appropriate unit of analysis to study the gendered impact of a pandemic? The study of gendered inequality - especially labor market opportunities and outcomes - has for the large...

We assess the impact of a new policy action in the form of cash child benefit introduced in Poland in 2016 (the program Family 500 +) on inequality and poverty. The analysis is based on micro-level household data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and Statistics Poland. We examine the...