Topic Inequality

Imputed Rent and Income Inequality: A Decomposition Analysis for Great Britain, West Germany and the U.S.

This article deals with income advantages derived from owner-occupied housing and their impact on the personal income distribution. Using micro-data from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) we find distinct cross-national differences in terms of the prevalence and extent of imputed rent. Results from inequality ...

Optimal Fiscal Policy in an Economy Facing Sociopolitical Instability

Income Risks within Retirement in Great Britain and Germany

This study examines income mobility amongst older people in Great Britain and Germany after retirement. The motivation is that older people may be subject to greater income risks in today's environment of early exits from the labour force, rising longevity and increasing reliance on private pension income. Our results provide evidence that income mobility amongst older people is more pronounced in ...

Who Are the Chronic Poor? Evidence on the Extent and the Composition of Chronic Poverty in Germany

Based on a multiple spells approach, this paper studies the extent and the composition of chronic poverty in Germany. The results indicate that about one third of cross-sectional poverty in a given year is chronic. The characteristics that are most closely associated with long-term poverty are economic inactivity and pensioner status, while the number of children and the gender of the household head ...

Target Shortfall Orderings and Indices

Given any income distribution, to each income we associate a subgroup containing all persons whose incomes are not higher than this income and a person's target shortfall in a subgroup is the gap between the subgroup highest income and his own income. We then develop an absolute target shortfall ordering, which, under constancy of population size and total income, implies the Lorenz and Cowell-Ebert ...

To What Extent Do Fiscal Regimes Equalize Opportunities for Income Acquisition among Citizens?

This paper employs the theory of equality of opportunity, described in Roemer's book (Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in 11 countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly speaking, equality of opportunity for incomes has been achieved in a country when it is the case that the distributions ...

The Measurement of Social Exclusion

This paper develops an axiomatic approach to the measurement of social exclusion. At the individual level, social exclusion is viewed in terms of deprivation of the person concerned with respect to different functionings in the society. At the aggregate level we treat social exclusion as a function of individual exclusions. The class of subgroup decomposable social exclusion measures using a set of ...

Income Satisfaction Inequality and Its Causes

In this paper, the concept of Income Satisfaction Inequality is operationalized on the basis of individual responses to an Income Satisfaction question posed in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Income satisfaction is the subjective analogue of the objective income concept and includes objective income inequality as a special case. The paper introduces a method to decompose Income Satisfaction ...

Smoothed Income Poverty in European Countries

The purpose of this paper is to obtain by combining two longitudinal perspectives a more detailed national picture of poverty in the Member States of the European Union, using the _rst four waves (1994 - 1997) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). In addition to this detailed consideration of the time dimension, poverty incidence, poverty gap and poverty intensity are measured. Overall, ...

Too Few Women in Top Posts