Simulation methods are used to investigate the cost-effectiveness and poverty-reducing effects of the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 (FMWA). The data set is created by matching and merging the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (March CPS) with the Earner Study files, which contain the best...

Some participants in income and labor market surveys fail to report their earnings. We use data on imputed and reported wages for the same workers, taken from the 1988 change in the CPS processing system to compare actual earnings to both hot-deck and earnings-equations imputations. Our results...

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...

Inference-based stochastic dominance procedures are applied to Luxembourg Income Study data to rank ten western countries in terms of standards of living and poverty. First-order dominance comparisons ranks more than 50 percent of all pairwise comparisons and second-order (generalized Lorenz)...

Typically, the study of post-war convergence has primarily focused on convergence in per capita incomes. By investigating convergence at population class means we can characterize convergence as either "equal" or "unequal" depending upon whether the (inverse) income distribution functions are...