French retirees benefit from specific taxation decreases. These tax exemptions imply considerable public tax expenditures that may be unjustifiable in terms of equity. In this article, we examine the adequacy of tax arrangements for French retirees in the current context of public pension...

This paper analyses optimal income taxes over the business cycle under a balanced-budget restriction, for low, middle and high income households. A model incorporating capital-skill complementarity in production and differential access to capital and labour markets is de-veloped to capture the...

This article attempts to apply and interpret the correspondent Identification Matrix test (White, 1982) for a Pareto type I distribution. One of the most cited datasets used by Pareto, England’s income distribution in 1843 and in 1879, is used. Our results suggest that an alternative...

We use the Interdistributional Lorenz Curves (ILCs) of Butler and McDonald (1987) to visualize convergence or divergence between income distributions. To illustrate the idea, we compare income distributions from Spain, Italy, and Germany. We also offer methods to test for significant differences...

During the last two decades most Western countries have experienced increased net immigration as well as increased income inequality. This article analyzes the effects on income inequality of an increased number of immigrants in Denmark and Germany for the 20- year period 1984-2003 and how the...

In this study, the empirical contents of various income inequality measures are compared under an identical framework with a well-tested data set. Our study suggests that long-term income inequality has a strong negative effect on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth under different measurements....

Redistributing incomes has always been one of the main goals of Iranian policy makers, although political regimes have changed frequently between 1991 and 2004. We have applied a microsimulation using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and a Heckman correction for sample selection bias to compare...

Inequality in earned wages is in our western society on the increase. Social mobility is on the decrease. The contribution of education to equality of opportunity is decreasing, because education adapts more slowly to the increasing complexities of our societies than the home and social...

Poverty and inequality are often estimated from grouped data as complete household surveys are neither always available to researchers nor easy to analyze. In this study we assess the performance of functional forms proposed by Kakwani (1980a) and Villasenor and Arnold(1989) to estimate the...

We consider the issue of income distribution modeling in the context of poverty analysis impact based on computable general equilibrium micro-simulation models. The empirical distribution function (EDF) is by far the most commonly used estimator in practice. It is, however, not the only...