Choosing an appropriate equivalence scale is a prerequisite for comparisons of economic wellbeing income distribution, inequality or poverty. This is true for country specific work or for cross-national comparisons. Researchers generally either use a country specific equivalence scale (social...

German and United States data from the Luxembourg Income Study are used to compare the relative economic well-being of Germans and Americans in the 1980s. In our analysis we use both official equivalence scales and consumption-based country-specific equivalence scales developed for Germany and...

The authors review from a critical perspective the ‘patrimonial capitalism’ approach, as well as its analysis of wage-labor transformations in developed economies during the last thirty years. For this purpose, they take the economies of France and the United States as study cases. According...

In the course of current climate negotiations, the world is watching the United States in particular. Together with China, the U.S. is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Real progress in protecting the global climate requires substantial action on America's part. The U.S. has the...

Though rates of intergenerational mobility are the same in the U.S. and Europe today, attitudes toward redistribution – that should reflect at least in part those rates – differ substantially. We examine differences in mobility between the U.S. and France since the middle of the nineteenth...