In this paper we pay attention to the legitimacy of the principles, scope and purpose of redistribution in Czech society. We use data from international surveys from the second half of the nineties, including European Values Study 1999 and ISSP 1996 – module Role of the Government and some...

Current debates on the welfare state entail two intertwined questions. First, does a nation have sufficient active labor force participation to maintain the benefits for non-participants? Second, do social provisions exacerbate or attenuate class, ethnic and other distinctions within society? As...

This paper compares the returns to human capital in the self-employed and wage-employed sectors of the economy. Using data from the former West German sample of the German Socioeconomic Panel survey for the 1984-1997 time period, we estimate returns to education and work experience from standard...

Micro-data estimates of welfare indices are known to be sensitive to observations from the tails of the income distribution. It is therefore customary to make adjustments to extreme data before estimating inequality and poverty statistics. This paper systematically evaluates the impact of such...

In this paper we propose a decomposition of the Foster, Greer, Thorbecke (FGT) class of poverty indexes into two additive components (namely, poverty within groups and poverty between groups) when both a community-wide threshold and a specific poverty line for each subgroup of population is...

This paper develops methods for decomposing changes in the income distribution using subgroup decompositions of the income density function. Overall changes are related to changes in subgroup shares and changes in subgroup densities, where the latter are broken down further using elementary...

This paper aims to analyse the evolution of consistent poverty, defined as the combination of income and living conditions to identify deprived people. The conclusions of other papers that show a high amount of poverty exits depending on temporary shocks of income are tested. In this paper we...

This paper attempts to identify macroeconomic factors of income mobility. Explored is the relationship between biannual relative income mobility, the relative change in the unemployment rate and the relative change in GDP. A theoretical model is proposed which provides an explanation of the...

In this paper we use data the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to describe and analyse the dynamics of joint labour force behaviour of older couples for the EU12 countries. We focus on three main issues: the relevance of joint retirement across EU12 countries, the existence of...