This paper exploits longitudinal employer-employee matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in earnings inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that factors that cannot be measured using...

We develop a framework for analyzing “medium-run” departures from balanced growth, and apply it to the economies of continental Europe. A time-varying factor-augmenting production function (mimicking “directed” technical change) with a below-unitary substitution elasticity coupled with...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

The 'big trade-off', described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again. Equality or efficiency, or to put it differently again: modern highly developed economies and societies have to choose between the Scylla of income inequality or the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it...

This paper offers a comprehensive econometric investigation of the impact of income inequality on the values endorsed by people. Using survey data from all thirty-four OECD countries over a period of almost thirty years, the following dimensions of value systems are investigated: work ethic,...

The Luxembourg Income Study data is used to explore the impact of taxes and transfer payments on the distribution of income across thirteen countries for different years. The five-parameter generalized beta distribution and ten of its special cases are considered as models for the size...