Are macroeconomic factors such as income inequality the real root causes of financial crises? We explore a variety of financial and macroeconomic variables to find the most reliable predictors for financial crises in 14 developed countries over a period of more than 100 years. Our results, based...

Bennett and Hatzimasoura (2011) derive a new class of poverty measures suitable for ordinal variables. These indices are weighted sums of the population probabilities of attaining each state of the ordinal variable which is below the poverty line. The weights are uniquely determined by the...

Social evaluation functions used in policy impact analysis can be viewed as real-valued functionals of the underlying outcome distributions. Influence functions may be used to identify the sources of variation in social outcomes in terms of individual or household characteristics. This paper...

In this paper, we measure the effect of changing capital income shares upon inequality of gross household income. Using EU-SILC data covering 17 EU countries from 2005 to 2011 we find that capital income shares are positively associated with the concentration of gross household income. Moreover,...

This document provides recent evidence about the persistency of wage gaps between formal and informal workers in Colombia. The methodology is based on a non-parametric procedure proposed by Nopo (2008a) that allows us to compare labor incomes using matching on variables over a Nationwide...

A usual interpretation of the high performance of the German economy since 2006 is that the Hartz labour market reforms have boosted German competitiveness, resulting in higher exports, higher production and lower unemployment. We start from the diagnosis that this explanation is at odds with...

In this paper, we survey the literature that studies the issue of growing inequalities in advanced countries (the North). We firstly unveil the main facts concerning widening inequality in the North and we underlie the differences between countries and groups of countries. We put forward the...

This paper looks at the association between wage satisfaction and different notions of reference wage, based on a matched employer-employee dataset. It shows that workers’ satisfaction depends on other-people’s income in different ways. Relative income concerns are important, but we also...

Western governments increasingly place more emphasis on non-income dimensions in measuring national well-being (e.g. the UK, France). Not only averages, but the characteristics of the whole distribution (e.g. inequalities) are taken into consideration. Commonly used data such as life...

We develop a measure of unemployment that takes into account both the level and intensity of unemployment and that satisfies several desirable properties, including distribution sensitivity (dealing with differences among the unemployed). It can also be decomposed into mean and distributional...