Deploying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) we analyze the variability of individual earnings and equivalent household income. Permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984-2008 are estimated for Old German Laender in order to determine their importance...

This study extends a bilateral gift exchange experiment by Clark et al. (2010) who investigate how feedback of information about wages paid in the market affects both employers' wage setting and workers' performance. We provide either quantitative or qualitative information on the average wage...

The decline of the middle class has been investigated as a principal aspect of social polarization (Wolfson 1994, 1997). Wang and Tsui 2000 have characterized a class of polarization measures by postulates on normalization, increasing spread and increasing bipolarity. The present paper...

Subgroup decomposability is a very useful property in an inequality measure, and level-sensitivity, which requires a given level of inequality to acquire a greater significance the poorer a population is, is a distributionally appealing axiom for an inequality index to satisfy. In this paper,...

In diesem Beitrag geht es um subjektive Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen, nicht Gerechtigkeit an sich, da erstere im Gegensatz zu letzterer empirisch feststellbar und handlungswirksam sind. Allerdings müssen ihre Folgen nicht nur gute sein. Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen können erstens die...

We conduct a survey with 264 participants to test for relative consumption effects of national and local public goods as well as private goods. In contrast to previous results, we find that relative consumption effects are more pronounced for private goods than for public goods. Our second...

Standardmethoden zur Schätzung von Disparitätsmaßen aus klassierten Daten basieren entweder auf der Bestimmung von Schranken, die den wahren Wert des jeweiligen Disparitätsmaßes einschließen (nichtparametrischer Ansatz) oder aber auf Annahmen bezüglich der den Daten zugrunde liegenden...

Let a society's unhappiness be measured by the aggregate of the levels of relative deprivation of its members. When two societies of equal size, F and M, merge, unhappiness in the merged society is shown to be higher than the sum of the levels of unhappiness in the constituent societies when...

This paper presents a new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for 104 developing countries. It is the first time multidimensional poverty is estimated using micro datasets (household surveys) for such a large number of countries which cover about 78 percent of the world's population. The MPI...

In this paper we reexamine the link between gender inequality and corruption. We review the literature on the relationship between representation of women in economic and political life, democracy and corruption, and bring in a new previously omitted variable that captures the level of...