The link between income inequality and governmental redistribution is still subject to intense research and debate. Starting with the median-voter-hypothesis, a plethora of theoretical models have been developed during the last three decades to identify and explain possible causal relationships....

The effective income tax function is useful and practical methodology to analyze the relationship between income and tax amounts. It includes the measures of tax progressivity, the maximum effective tax rate, and horizontal inequity. We statistically estimated the effective income tax function...

In this paper education simultaneously affects growth and income inequality. More education does not necessarily decrease inequality when the latter is assessed by the Lorenz dominance criterion. Increases in education first increase and then decrease growth as well as income inequality, when...

The paper investigates how the income distribution affects the subjective well-being of society. Starting from the concept of a social welfare function defined on income distributions it assesses the preference for equality in European countries. It examines how mean income and the distribution...

We provide a characterization of the generalised satisfaction - in our terminology nondeprivation - quasi-ordering introduced by S.R. Chakravarty (Keio Economic Studies 34 (1997), 17-32) for making welfare comparisons based on the absence of deprivation. We show that the non-deprivation...

Mandelbrot (1960) proposed using the so-called Pareto-Lévy class of distributions as a framework for representing income distributions. We argue in this paper that the Pareto-Lévy distribution is an interesting candidate for representing income distribution because its parameters are easy to...

Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called...

Panel attrition has not only the potential to bias population estimates but it may also inflate the variance of the estimates from panel surveys. Thus it is essential for an ongoing panel survey to monitor not only the size of the panel attrition and the potential biases that may occur but also...