Diminishing marginal well-being from income suggests that redistributing income from the rich to the poor will raise average levels of well-being within a society. This utilitarian logic suggests that— conditional on average income—countries with greater income inequality will experience lower levels of average well-being. Yet existing research has failed to find clear evidence that inequality ...

All of the recent empirical work on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth has used inequality data that are not consistently measured. This paper argues that this is inappropriate and shows that the significant negative correlation often found between income inequality and growth across countries is not robust when income inequality is measured in a consistent manner. H...

This study performs a long-run, inter-temporal analysis of income inequality in the U.S. spanning the period 1916-2012. We employ both descriptive analysis and the ThresholdMinimum Dominating Set methodology from Graph Theory, to examine the evolution of inequality through time. In doing so, we use two alternative measures of inequality: the Top 1% share of income and the Gini coefficient. This...

INTRODUCTION Few studies have measured gender inequality at levels lower than the country. We sought to develop neighbourhood indicators of gender inequality, and assess their ability to capture variability in gender inequality across Québec, Canada. METHODS Aggregate 2001 census data for 11,564 neighbourhoods were obtained for men and women. Twelve indicators of gender inequality representin...

In recent years, a number of studies have examined the influence of public opinion on government policy, but few have considered the influence of opinion on social conditions. These are separate questions, since policies may not have the intended effects, and opinion may influence outcomes directly apart from government policy. This paper examines the relationship between public opinion and inc...

The present study concentrates on the income distribution effects of A Finnish Work Incentive Trap Reform started in 1996. I estimate how the reforms made have affected income levels and income inequality the distribution of economic wellbeing. I look at the effects both without and with behavioral response. The data used is the Income Distribution Statistics of Statistics Finland from the year...

We use a new method to estimate China’s income distributions using publicly available interval summary statistics from China’s largest national household survey. We examine rural, urban, and overall income distributions for each year from 1985-2001. By estimating the entire distributions, we can show how the distributions change directly as well as examine trends in traditional welfare indices ...

We apply stochastic dominance tests to investigate trends in inequality in Australia over the period 1983 to 1998. Results show significant levels of inequalities in the income and expenditure distributions for the population as a whole as well as within population groups. We further find that the impact of the government’s tax and transfer redistribution scheme varied greatly among the differe...

S ince the early 2000s, research by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (and their coauthors, including Anthony Atkinson and Gabriel Zucman) has revolutionized our understanding of income and wealth inequality. The crucial point of departure for this revolution is the extensive data they have used, based largely on administrative tax records. Piketty’s (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century is...