This paper documents the magnitude of income mobility in Germany and its distribution across different income positions, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The suggested graphical approach makes it straightforward to identify the portions of the distribution that have the largest impact on aggregate ‘income movement’ indices à la Fields & Ok, and hence offers a starting point to h...

Income distribution is extremely important for development, since it influences the cohesion of society, determines the extent of poverty for any given average per capita income and the poverty-reducing effects of growth, and even affects people’s health. The paper reviews the connections between income distribution and economic growth. It finds that the Kuznets hypothesis that income distribut...

Survey of Consumer Finances cross-sectional data from 1973 to 1996 are used in this article to examine Canadian trends in income inequality over the middle and later stages of the life course of a synthetic cohort born between 1922 and 1926. Using Gini coefficients, the findings show that income inequality decreases within a cohort as it grows old; that is, the Canadian retirement income system...

Researchers frequently studied the casual relationships of other-regarding preferences by applying experimental methods in bilateral settings (e.g., dictator game and ultimatum game). We use a framed experiment on taxes to study preferences for redistribution in a multi-person setting. We find presence of heterogeneous preferences with a substantial share of tax rate choices in line with both p...

Using transnational terrorism data from 1980 to 2000, this study empirically examines the relationships between frequency of participation in transnational terrorism acts and economic development and education improvement. We find an inverse U-shaped association between the frequency of various nationals acting as perpetrators in transnational terrorism acts and per capita income in their respe...

One typically observes differing trends in the distribution of gross incomes across countries. Where do these inequalities originate from? We consider a simple model where individuals have identical preferences but different abilities, and we investigate the impact on the distribution of gross income of changes in the way abilities are distributed among the individuals. Journal of Economic Lite...

We use a firm-CEO assignment framework to model the market for CEO effective labor. In the model’s equilibrium more talented CEOs match with and supply more effort to larger firms. Taxation of CEO incomes affects the equilibrium pricing of CEO effective labor and, hence, spills over and affects firm profits. Absent the ability to tax profits or a direct concern for firm owners, a standard presc...

Internation comparisons of average national incomes omit important information about leisure, home production, health, etc. They are also bedevilled by index number problems. This paper suggests ways of combining working hours and life-expectancy with income comparisons, and shows that the fixed-price indexes of real income, such as those in the Penn World Table, substantially understate the in...

Individuals’ aversion to risk and inequality, and their concern for relative standing, are measured through experimental choices between hypothetical societies. It is found that, on average, individuals are both fairly inequality-averse and have a strong concern for relative income. The results are used to illustrate welfare consequences based on a utilitarian SWF and a modified CRRA utility fu...

Figure 1: United States, Year 2000 Median Household Income – on the U.S. National Level plot there are high income clusters on the East Side of Central Park, and in suburbs of Chicago but not its downtown neighborhood. In the San Francisco area we can identify Silicon Valley; the income in this small area is significantly greater than average (Data=Block Level; Global Shape=Cartogram based on H...