This paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. In a simple principal agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. In this environment unfairness can arise if an agent's reward expectation is not met. Throughout the experiment we record agents' heart rate variability. ...
The distribution of personal income in a society depends strongly on the within-household distribution of income. Nevertheless, little is known about this phenomenon. I analyze the sharing of income among household partners from a welfare economic perspective. Measures of financial satisfaction for both household partners are used to gain information about the within-household distribution of income-induced ...
Population surveys around the world face the problem of declining cooperation and participation rates of respondents. Not only can item nonresponse and unit nonresponse impair important outcome measures for inequality research such as total household disposable income; there is also a further case of missingness confronting household panel surveys that potentially biases results. The approach commonly ...
The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the ease with which individuals' tasks can be offshored. Our analysis relates to recent theoretical contributions arguing that there is only a loose relationship between the suitability of a task for offshoring and the associated skill level. Accordingly, wage effects of offshoring can be very heterogeneous within skill groups. ...
We show that the choice of the welfare measure has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. Combining various income and wealth measures with different health measures, we calculate 80 health concentration indices. The influence of the welfare measure is more pronounced when using subjective health measures than when using objective health measures.
I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004) prediction that individuals' reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference incomeis not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants' reference income and their return visits to their countries of origin. I derive the (arguably counter-intuitive) ...
Do EU citizens have an increased opportunity to improve their position in the distribution of lifetime earnings? To what extent does earnings mobility work to equalize/disequalize longerterm earnings relative to cross-sectional inequality and how does it differ across the EU? Our basic assumption is that mobility measured over a horizon of 8 years is a good proxy for lifetime mobility. We used the ...
Reliable measures of poverty are an essential statistical tool for public policies aimed at reducing poverty. In this paper we consider the reliability of income poverty measures based on survey data which are typically plagued by missing data and measurement error. Neglecting these problems can bias the estimated poverty rates. We show how to derive upper and lower bounds for the population poverty ...
This paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. We use an integrated approach exploiting complementarities between controlled lab and representative panel data. In a simple principal-agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. Throughout the experiment we record ...
