We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures of income risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as a source of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contribution to total income risk of demographic and labour market factors. Empirical evidence supporting our arguments is provided using data from the British Household Survey. JEL ...

In this paper we explore the application of Generalised Additive Models of Location, Scale and Shape for the analysis of conditional income distributions in Germany following the reunification. We find that conditional income distributions can generally be modelled using the three parameter Dagum distribution and our results hint at an even more pronounced effect of skill-biased technological c...

Theories of political redistribution are tested using data collected in three phases of the International Social Survey Programme. Individuals categorized as having high, middle, or low incomes were asked whether they consider the overall tax burden in their countries too high, too low or about right. Very few citizens indicated that they were satisfied with tax systems; most believed that taxe...

Social Spending Generosity and Income Inequality: A Dynamic Panel Approach This paper explores if more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System GMM estimator and use the presum...

Social choice theory is concerned with the evaluation of alternative methods of collective decision-making, as well as with the logical foundations of welfare economics. In turn, welfare economics is concerned with the critical scrutiny of the performance of actual and/or imaginary economic systems, as well as with the critique, design and implementation of alternative economic policies. The Ha...

The paper tries to relate inequality, occupational choice and long run wealth. Defining the unskilled as poor, skilled group as middle class and entrepreneurs as rich the paper focusesstarting from a huge middle class relative to the rich along with a higher fraction of borrowing entrepreneurs within the rich group, an economy converges with a very low wealth level. In other words, one needs to...

Article history: Received 16 October 2009 Received in revised form 6 June 2010 Accepted 11 June 2010 Available online 19 June 2010 The paper studies in a simple, Downsian model of political competition the private provision of public goods embedded in a system of democracy and redistributive taxation. Results show that the positive effect of inequality on production of public goods, to which Ol...

The size distributions of many economic variables seem to obey the double power law, that is, the power law holds in both the upper and the lower tails. I explain this emergence of the double power law—which has important economic, econometric, and social implications—using a tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents subject to aggregate and idiosyncratic ...

Long Term Earnings Inequality, Earnings Instability and Temporary Employment in Spain: 1993–2000 This paper provides a longitudinal perspective on changes in Spanish male earnings inequality for the period 1993-2000, by decomposing the earnings covariance structure into its permanent and transitory parts. According to the Spanish sample of the European Community Household Panel, cross-sectional...

This paper presents a non-parametric microsimulation methodology for assessing the determinants of changes in income inequality and poverty. One great advantage of this method over alternatives is that it is not very demanding in terms of modelling labour supply and household behaviour while still providing a plausible link between changes in overall labour market conditions and the full househ...