This chapter presents a cross-national portrait of gender equality in the labor market in the early 1990s, based on Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data from fifteen countries. Cross-country comparisons are analyzed in the context of variation both across, and within, the three welfare state...

The increase in dispersion of personal earnings in the USA has received considerable attention and has been analyzed extensively. The evidence for other countries is less systematic. There are a few comparative studies, but they tend to focus on descriptions of the overall distribution of income...

A bottom-line of the interest in welfare state programs and cross-national variations in the pattern, size and structure of various social policies, is that we expect that the welfare state is an institution that greatly affects our lives and well-being. A further assumption is that this impact...

In this paper we use cross-national comparisons made possible by the LIS to examine America's experience in maintaining a low poverty rate. We compare the effectiveness of United States antipoverty policies to that of similar polices elsewhere in the industrialized world. If lessons can be...

This paper employs Luxembourg Income Study data for women in five industrialized countries to answer the following questions: Do family gaps in women's wage vary across levels of education? Does educational attainment help to 'insure' a woman against child wage penalties? Cross-national analysis...

Comparative poverty research flourishes, especially since comparable income data are easily available through the Luxembourg Income Study. However, a number of methodological pitfalls in comparative poverty research are often overlooked. There is a vast amount of literature on sensitivity of...

What is the distribution of real income within and across countries? The purpose of this paper is to try to answer this question by presenting estimates of the real purchasing power (PPP) parity-adjusted distribution of disposable income for a number of countries. The major tool for converting...

The aim of this study is to clarify, whether and where the widespread opinion that systemic change from socialism to capitalism went along with dramatically rising inequality is true and how income distribution does affect the overall growth performance of transition countries. The countries...