Most empirical distributional studies of well-being in developed countries rely on distributions of disposable income. From a theoretical point of view this practice is contentious since a household’s command over resources is determined not only by its spending power over commodities it can...

Direct provision of public services can alter the balance of resources across income groups. We focus on the issues arising when taking account of the impact of publicly provided education services across the income distribution. We combine OECD information on spending per student in particular...

The usual practice in empirical distributional studies is to use either disposable income or consumption expenditure as a proxy for welfare. Essentially, both variables are used as approximations of the unobserved “permanent income” of the population members. This paper exploits the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the distributional implications of using full income instead of disposable income in the analysis of economic inequality. For that purpose the authors employ a very extensive list of noncash incomes with the aim of examining the distributional...