Since the end of the 1970s, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in economic inequality. While the United States has long been among the most unequal of the world’s rich economies, the economic and social upheaval that began in the 1970s was a striking departure from the movement...

The traditional avoidance literature undeservedly neglects tax base distribution as a factor affecting the avoidance price, and generally assumed to be equal to the avoidance cost. In reality, avoidance providers are usually either high-skilled specialists or insiders. The strong collusion thus,...

This paper explains how to build Lorenz Curves for income distributions and discusses their use for inequality measurement. A short conceptual background, a step-by-step procedure and a simple numerical example illustrate how to calculate and draw Lorenz Curves. A discussion on the use of Lorenz...

This module illustrates how Generalised Lorenz (GL) Curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds, within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options, in many of the cases where ordinary Lorenz curves fail to work After...

The analysis provides a new explanation for two widespread problems concerning European unemployment policy: the disappointingly small effect of many past reform measures on unemployment, and the political difficulties in implementing more extensive reform programs. We argue that the heart of...

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of economic policy and structural change on gender inequality in employment and economic opportunities for a set of 18 Latin American countries over the time period 1990-2010. We use three different methodologies to explore this question:...

We model the evolution of age-dependent personal income distribution and inequality as expressed by the Gini ratio. In our framework, inequality is an emergent property of a theoretical model we develop for the dynamics of individual incomes. The model relates the evolution of personal income to...

This paper analyses the NAIRU making use of a cointegrated VAR and of Italian labour market data. We show that a cointegrated VAR represents a statistically adequate (using Aris Spanos's terminology) approach to the estimation of the NAIRU. This is an effective way to overcome several problems...

The Great Recession has exposed several failings in the mainstream economics profession, including a generalised neglect of the macro role of debt and of banking. Steve Keen has proposed an alternative approach to macroeconomics which he sometimes labels as the...