High welfare dependency and poverty rate among lone mothers prompted a workfare reform of the Norwegian welfare system for lone parents: activity requirements were brought in, time limits imposed and benefit levels raised. To evaluate the reform we introduce an estimator that, unlike the much...

Using internal and public use March Current Population Survey data, we analyze trends in US income inequality (1975-2004). Using a multiple imputation approach where values for censored observations are imputed using draws from a Generalized Beta distribution of the Second Kind, we find that the...

The generalized entropy class of inequality indices is derived for Generalized Beta of the Second Kind (GB2) income distributions, thereby providing a full range of top-sensitive and bottom-sensitive measures. An examination of British income inequality in 1994/95 and 2004/05 illustrates the...

Women working full-time in the UK earn on average about 18% per hour less than men (EOC, 2005). Traditional labour economics has focussed on gender differences in human capital to explain the gender wage gap. Although differences in male and female human capital are recognized to derive from...

This study gives an overview of the pathways from work to retirement in Britain and Germany. Although the institutional incentives differ considerably, both countries face a trend towards early retirement. In Germany, this development was mostly attributed to the favourable conditions in the...