Prior empirical studies have found that American workers report longer hours than workers in other highly industrialized countries, and that the highly educated report the longest hours relative to other educational levels. This paper analyzes disparities in working hours by gender and education...

This paper explores the sources of variation in state redistribution across 13 developed democracies over the 1979-2000 period, drawing upon data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the Luxembourg Income Study and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems....

Most examinations of United States domestic antipoverty policy are inherently parochial, for they are based on the experiences of only our nation in isolation from the others. However, cross-national comparisons can also teach lessons about antipoverty policy. While all nations value low...

This article compares recent economic inequality in industrialized nations, largely those belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This research finds the United States has the highest overall level of inequality of any rich OECD nation in the mid-1990s. It...

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we develop the measurement theory of polarization for the case in which asset distributions can be described using density functions. Second, we provide sample estimators of population polarization indices that can be used to compare polarization...

This paper examines the effect of public assistance, labor market and marriage market conditions on the prevalence of single mother families across countries and over time. A multinomial logit derived from a random utility approach is estimated using individual level data for 14 countries. I...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a...

In this paper we examine whether a generalized version of Flam and Helpman's (1987) model of vertical differentiation can reconcile three facts. One, countries import only a subset of available varieties. Two, import prices vary across exporters within narrow product categories. Three, US growth...

This paper contributes to a broader understanding of the role of marriage in gender stratification from a comparative perspective by providing important descriptive evidence of the distribution of the marriage wage gap for men and women crossnationally. This paper focuses on marital status and...

The standard poverty lines applied in empirical research tend to be problematic in terms of validity, reliability, ease of application or socio-political credibility. This paper introduces an international version of an alternative method, which originally has been developed for the Netherlands....