The growing interest in cross-national comparisons of income inequality is primarily a result of the establishment of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database and the wide range of studies on income inequality based on LIS data. These studies suffer, however, from a major weakness since...

As an alternative to the conventional methods for measuring chronic poverty, this paper proposes an interpersonal comparable measure of permanent income as a basis for defining and measuring chronic poverty. This approach accounts for the fact that individuals regularly undertake inter-period...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an evaluation of how local public in-kind benefits affect the distribution of income in Norway. To this end, a method that accounts for differences between municipalities in capacity to produce the same standard of public services is used for assessing the...

A major aim of most income distribution studies is to make comparisons of income inequality across time for a given country and/or compare and rank different countries according to the level of income inequality. However, most of these studies lack information on sampling errors, which makes it...

As is known from the economic literature, the notion of negative/positive duration dependence defined in terms of a decreasing/increasing hazard function can solely be used as a basis for revealing whether negative/positive duration dependence is present or not. However, when concern is directed...

This paper compares income inequality and income mobility in the Scandinavian countries and the United States during the 1980's. The results demonstrate that inequality is greater in the United States than in the Scandinavian countries and that the ranking of countries with respect to inequality...

The purpose of this paper is to present an exercise where we identify optimal income tax rules according to various social welfare criteria, keeping fixed the total net tax revenue. Empirical applications of optimal taxation theory have typically adopted analytical expressions for the optimal...

The paper presents a model of household labour supply that allows for simultaneous decisions of household members, complex and non-convex choice sets induced by tax and benefit rules, and quantity constraints on hours choice. The model is estimated using the 1993 Bank of Italy’s Survey of...

This paper uses the Peruvian Living Standard Survey (PLSS) data to analyze: (a) inequality in the distribution of income; (b) labor market participation of men and women and the variations in hours of work; and (c) the relationship between variations in labor supply and income inequality. It uses...

This projeect employs the theory of equality of opportunity, described in Roemer's (Equality of Opportunity), Havard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in ten countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly speaking,...