The living conditions and well-being of the middle class are traditionally considered an expression of how society is progressing. Yet growing inequality and the polarization of incomes observed in Western countries due to globalization, the recession and rapid technological change, is leading...

This paper uses age-period-cohort models to show that the living standards (total monetary incomes after public benefits and contributions, adjusted for household size and inflation) of successive birth cohorts in the United States and Germany are strongly correlated with general changes in...

Over the last three decades, the wealth-to-income ratio (WIR) in many Western countries, particularly in Europe and North America, increased by a factor of two. This represents a defining empirical trend: a rewealthization (from the French repatrimonialisation) – or the comeback of (inherited)...

This paper presents a methodology for comparing income rank volatility profiles over time and across distributions. While most of the existing measures are affected by changes in marginal distributions, this paper proposes a framework that is based on individuals’ relative positions in the...