Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to anincrease in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfaredepend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data onconsumption and income to...

This paper develops a framework for studying individuals ideas about what constitutes justcompensation for chief executive officers (CEOs) and reports estimates of just CEO pay andthe principles guiding ideas of justice. The sample consists of students pursuing a Master ofBusiness Administration...

In spite of there being few elements of tax or cash benefit systems in developed countriesthat are any longer explicitly gender-biased in a discriminatory sense, it is well recognisedthat they have significant gender effects. To the extent that women earn less than men onaverage under...

When treatment effects of active labour market programmes are heterogeneous in anobservable way across the population, the allocation of the unemployed into differentprogrammes becomes a particularly important issue. In this paper, we present a statisticalmodel designed to improve the present...

A large empirical literature documents a rise in wage inequality in the American economy. Itis silent on whether the increase in inequality is due to greater heterogeneity in thecomponents of earnings that are predictable by agents or whether it is due to greateruncertainty faced by agents...

Differences in geopolitical regions of Nigeria are not debatable. However, there is no clearconsensus on the dimension of these disparities. In this paper, claims of geopolitical regiondisparities in labor market outcomes are investigated using survey data from Nigeria between1996-1999...

To assess the impact of tax-benefit policy changes on income distribution over time, wesuggest a methodology based on counterfactual simulations. We start by decomposingchanges in inequality/poverty indices into three contributions: reforms of the tax-benefitstructure (rules, rates, etc.),...

The emergence of a transitional labor market offers new opportunities to workers, but at thesame time bears the risk of (new) inequalities. This paper deals with unequal chances on thetransitional labor market in the Netherlands, in particular for workers from the four largestimmigrant groups:...

The March Current Population Survey (CPS) is the primary data source for estimation oflevels and trends in labor earnings and income inequality in the USA. Time-inconsistencyproblems related to top coding in theses data have led many researchers to use the ratio ofthe 90th and 10th percentiles...

We analyze the distribution and concentration of market incomes in Germany in the period1992 to 2001 on the basis of an integrated data set of individual tax returns and the GermanSocio-Economic Panel. The unique feature of this integrated data set is that it encompassesthe whole spectrum of the...