The paper examines sensitivity influences on the German personal income distribution in a time-series perspective as well as in a methodically broad manner. The author discusses the following issues: (1) For the first time, (reference) income-dependent, so-called variable equivalence scales are...

The aim of this paper is to provide an estimation and decomposition of the motherhood wage penalty in Colombia. Our empirical strategy is based on the matching procedure designed by Ñopo (2008) for the case of gender wage gaps. This is an alternative procedure to the well-known Blinder-Oaxaca...

The article analyses the joint determinants of inequality and growth with a special emphasis on public spending structures in transition. We find especially government expenditures on subsidies to be negatively correlated with both inequality and growth, as more generally government expenditures...

The aim of this paper is to explain why poverty and material deprivation in South Africa are significantly higher among those of African descent than among whites. To do so, we estimate the conditional levels of poverty and deprivation Africans would experience had they the same characteristics...

This paper introduces a new Lorenz dominance criterion that allows ranking income distributions according to ray-invariant intermediate inequality measures. In doing so, it defines a-Lorenz curves by adapting the generalized Lorenz curves to this case. In addition, it provides an empirical...

Conventional wisdom predicts that changes in the aggregate unemployment rate may significantly affect a country’s income distribution and, as a consequence, have a relevant impact on the evolution of the poverty rate. However, the relationship between labour macroeconomic indicators and...

The multitude of available poverty measures can confuse a policy maker who wants to evaluate a poverty-reduction policy. We proposes a rule for ranking poverty measures by use of the food-gap, calculated as the cost-difference between a household’s normative food basket, derived from a healthy...

This paper examines the link between inequality and individual well-being using household survey data from 27 Transition Economies, where income inequality increased considerably since 1989. A test of inequality aversion in individual preferences that draws on the Fehr and Schmidt (QJE, 1999)...

In this paper we analyze the way in which changes in macro-economic circumstances and labour market institutions, that occurred in Italy over the ‘90s, affected the set of opportunities for young generations, amplify or shrinking existing inequalities. In particular we investigate whether they...

This paper proposes two related measures of educational inequality: one for educational achievement and another for educational opportunity. The former is the simple variance (or standard deviation) of test scores. Its selection is informed by consideration of two measurement issues that have...