This paper compares poverty rates for female-headed families and for other families in a number of developed countries. The author concludes that there are many different reasons female-headed families suffer relatively greater poverty in some countries but not in other countries. One...

This article employs the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to compare poverty rates for female-headed households (FHHs) with poverty rates for other households in a number of developed and transitional economies. It then seeks to explain why, in some countries, female-headed households are so much...

Did the US middle class benefit from the 1990s economic boom? Did this halt or reverse a middle class decline from the previous decade or more? Is a shrinking middle class strictly a US phenomenon with domestic causes, or is a problem that has plagued most of the world economy? This paper will...

This paper provides a short history of family allowances and documents that Keynes supported family allowances as early as the 1920s and continuing through the 1930s and early 1940s. Keynes saw this policy as a way to help households raise their children and also as a way to increase consumption...

This paper updates and extends my earlier work, published in the Journal of Economic Issues, on how the middle class fares throughout the world. My 2007 paper provided a definition of the middle class as well as estimates of the size of the middle class in several nations. It argued that the...

It is well known that women are much more likely to be poor than men. This is true in the US and in most developed nations. But the causes of this phenomenon remain a matter of dispute. This paper looks at two feminist explanations for the feminization of poverty. First, there is the issue of...

This chapter examines the tradeoffs inherent in guaranteed income proposals. Its perspective is international, using standardized income data across nations and asking whether economic efficiency suffers when governments make greater efforts to protect the poor. It is recognized that this is not...

This paper discusses the regressive nature of tax exemptions for children compared to child allowances and estimates the decline in child poverty in several developed countries due to child allowances. The paper then estimates the decline in child poverty in the US due to tax exemptions for...

This study uses the Luxembourg Income Study to examine the size of the middle class across several less developed American nations. One main finding is that in the mid 2000s the size of the middle class in Latin America does not seem to depend on demographic factors. A second finding is that, in...