Economists have long speculated that envy and malice play important roles in economic decisions. Surprisingly little empirical evidence has been offered in support of such claims. This paper uses experimental and multinomial logit techniques to estimate the effects of envy and malice in economic...

This paper comments on the work of Rector et al. (1999a, 1999b). The poverty lines implicit in their restrictive material deprivation approach are disputed and the claim that America has triumphed over poverty is rejected. Evidence is presented showing that poverty among the poorest Americans...

This paper develops and applies new measures of poverty that overcome a number of specific methodological flaws in the official US poverty statistics. Sen's distribution sensitive index of poverty and each of its components are estimated at several distinct poverty thresholds for the period...

Recent advances in the evaluation of the economic well-being are applied to assess the status of elderly Americans in the 1980s and 1990s. Micro data for the elderly and nonelderly populations are analyzed using stochastic dominance. A distinguishing feature of the research is that it goes...

This paper develops distribution-free statistical inference procedures to test for changes in tax progressivity. Tests for both the Reynolds-Smolensky index of residual progression and the Kakwani index of liability progression are provided. Changes in tax progressivity in three Western...

The measurement of global tax progressivity has been extensively debated over the last decade. We find that the debate stems from a failure to fully recognize the role of the average tax burden. We demonstrate that, once the effect of the average tax burden is controlled for, the two major...

The fairness of a tax change is often judged by examining its impact on tax burdens or net incomes of different income classes. Two competing definitions of tax neutrality give surprisingly different and conflicting answers to the fairness question. If the objective is to maximize welfare, the...