Using data from the German SOEP, this paper analyses whether there have been (a) any significant changes in poverty rates and poverty intensities before and after the Hartz IV reforms and (b) whether there have been observable changes in the effect of employment in reducing the threat or intensity of poverty. Using multivariate analyses we can find no evidence of increases in poverty rates comp...

Demand for Redistribution, Support for the Welfare State, and Party Identification in Austria This paper describes subjective wage inequality and the demand for redistribution in Austria using individuals' estimates of occupational wages from the International Social Survey Program. Although these estimates differ widely across individuals, the data clearly show that most individuals would like...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the authors and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper assesses the distributional impact of the recent VAT r...

This paper investigates empirically why Japan’s household savings rate fell in the 1990s. We constructed an economic model consisting of two types of household: unconstrained life-cycle households and liquidity-constrained households. Unconstrained households generally save, but liquidity-constrained households consume all of their disposable income. We found that the proportion of liquidity-co...

Data Issues and Databases Used in Analysis of Growth, Poverty and Economic Inequality This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency, variable definiti...

Disposable income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient and using the Family Budget Survey data, increased very little, and by a similar amount, from 1989 to 1993 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This surprising result is examined with an analysis of changes in the channels of redistribution and a Gini decomposition. We find that the sizeable increase in overall inequality due to c...

Regional Income Inequality in Selected Large Countries Income inequality can be measured at different levels of aggregation such as global, continental, international and national levels. Here we consider income inequality at the national level but the focus is on the within country regional inequality. Regional inequality in income distribution in a selection of large countries measured by the...

Remittances and Inequality: A Dynamic Migration Model We develop a model of the interdependencies between migration, remittances and inequality, and investigate how migration and subsequent remittances affect inter-household inequality in the origin communities. An important feature of our model is that we take into account the impact of migration on the local (rural) labor market. Migration is...

This paper explores the macroeconomic and welfare implications of the sharp rise in US wage inequality (1967-1995). In the data, cross-sectional earnings variation increased substantially more than wage variation, due to a sharp rise in the wage-hours correlation. On the contrary, inequality in hours worked, consumption and wealth (excluding the top 1%) remained roughly constant through time. U...

The paper evaluates the distributional effects of conventional and unconventional monetary policies for the USA. The distributional effects are evaluated for the overall impact on the income distribution, using Gini index. The paper also assesses the effects of conventional and unconventional monetary policies on the different parts of income distribution, employing corresponding percentile rat...