Food price inflation in Brazil in the twelve months to June 2008 was 18 percent, while overall inflation was 5.3 percent. This paper uses spatially disaggregated monthly data on consumer prices and two different household surveys to estimate the welfare consequences of these food price...

Our new approach to mobility measurement involves separating out the valuation of positions in terms of individual status (using income, social rank, or other criteria) from the issue of movement between positions. The quantification of movement is addressed using a general concept of distance...

This paper studies the distribution of labour earnings among employees within the EU using data from Wave 2007-1 of the Community Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EUSILC). The review of available information and the comparisons with external sources show that the EU-SILC data are not...

Using Italian data on Income and Living Conditions for the year 2005, the paper explores empirically whether the determinants of subjective economic well-being (SEW) differ (or not) in four representative typologies of households. By means of a Partial Proportional Ordered Logit Model the...

In this paper, taking as starting point the link between polarization and dispersion, we reformulate the measure of polarization of Zhang and Kanbur (2001) using the decomposition of the variance instead of the decomposition of the Theil index. The proposed measure is equivalent to the...

Conventional wisdom states that fiscal policy redistributes little in Latin America. Lower tax revenues and – above all – lower and less progressive transfers have been identified as the main cause. Existing studies show that, while in Europe the distribution of all transfers combined (cash...

This paper suggests multidimensional affluence measures for the top of the distribution. In contrast to commonly used top income shares, they allow the analysis of the extent, intensity and breadth of affluence in several dimensions within a common framework. We illustrate this by analyzing the...

This paper provides new evidence on individual preferences over annuities and lump sum payments based on hypothetical questions posed in the DNB Household Survey in 2005. Contrary to the majority of papers in the annuitization puzzle literature, this study allows to control explicitly for the...

We analyze polarization in India roughly in the past two and half decades using consumption expenditure data. We show that both bipolarization and multidimensional polarization (on several dimensions: caste, rural-urban, state, region) have increased since the 1990s. In the case of...

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...