This Paper surveys major empirical regularities concerning changes in earnings inequality in Europe and the US over the past 25 years. Next, it indicates which of these regularities can be explained within the competitive demand–supply framework of analysis and what is left unexplained....

This paper surveys major empirical regularities concerning changes in earnings inequality in Europe and the U.S. over the past 25 years. Next, it indicates which of these regularities can be explained within the competitive demand-supply framework of analysis and what is left unexplained....

For the purpose of studying the consequences of the ageing of the Swedish population a group of scientists have enlarged the microsimulation model SESIM - originally developed at the Swedish Ministry of Finance - with modules that simulate health status, take up of sickness benefits, retirement,...

Quality of life differences across areas can be measured by differences in real wages where real wages are computed as nominal wages adjusted for the cost of living. Computing cost of living differences involves several important issues, including how housing prices should be measured. Previous...

I discuss reasons why manufacturing productivity statistics should be interpreted with caution in light of the recent growth of domestic and foreign outsourcing and offshoring. First, outsourcing and offshoring are poorly measured in U.S. statistics, and poor measurement may impart a significant...

Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...

Earlier research on poverty failed to provide us with consistent measures of its prevalence across space and time. This is due to the limitations of the available sources and to the difficulty of applying to them the poverty definitions of modern social science. This article discusses different...

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...

The problem of land inequality has attracted renewed interest in the development literature due to its potential effects on the welfare of smallholder farmers. Poverty reduction is an important sustainable development goal and a clearer understanding of the factors that could lead to poverty is...

Married women in the United States are increasingly integral to their families' economic wellbeing. With two-earner families becoming the norm, little research investigates the role of wives in family income mobility. How much does a wife's labor market activity matter in her family's ability to...