This article compares recent economic inequality in industrialized nations, largely those belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This research finds the United States has the highest overall level of inequality of any rich OECD nation in the mid-1990s. It...

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we develop the measurement theory of polarization for the case in which asset distributions can be described using density functions. Second, we provide sample estimators of population polarization indices that can be used to compare polarization...

This paper examines the effect of public assistance, labor market and marriage market conditions on the prevalence of single mother families across countries and over time. A multinomial logit derived from a random utility approach is estimated using individual level data for 14 countries. I...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a...

In this paper we examine whether a generalized version of Flam and Helpman's (1987) model of vertical differentiation can reconcile three facts. One, countries import only a subset of available varieties. Two, import prices vary across exporters within narrow product categories. Three, US growth...

This paper contributes to a broader understanding of the role of marriage in gender stratification from a comparative perspective by providing important descriptive evidence of the distribution of the marriage wage gap for men and women crossnationally. This paper focuses on marital status and...

The standard poverty lines applied in empirical research tend to be problematic in terms of validity, reliability, ease of application or socio-political credibility. This paper introduces an international version of an alternative method, which originally has been developed for the Netherlands....

High rates of corporate taxation reduce corporate investment and thereby depress local wages. Using cross-country data from the Luxembourg Income Study, I estimate that a ten percentage point increase in the corporate tax rate of high-income countries reduces mean annual gross wages by seven...

The paper draws on the LIS data to describe the socio-economic situation of the Middle Classes for a selection of European countries over the last 30 years. The LIS data were used as they cover a wide range of countries, including not only European countries, but also American and Asiatic...