This paper investigates whether the contribution of the declining share of wages in national income to the upswing in profitability between 1982 and 1997 in the United States was aided by the growing incorporation of women into employment. The analysis finds that women helped moderate the...

Forty-five years ago, the A. Philip Randolph Institute issued "The Freedom Budget," in which a program for economic transformation was proposed that included a job guarantee for everyone ready and willing to work, a guaranteed income for those unable to work or those who should not be working,...

Robert Brenner has argued in a recent essay that the decline in manufacturing profitability in the United States since the mid-1960s can be attributed mainly to intensified foreign competition. I attempt to show that Brenner's argument is logically incongruent, and does not fit with the observed...

Gauging the severity of poverty in a given country requires a reasonably comprehensive measurement of whether individuals and households are surpassing some basic threshold of material well-being. This would seem to be an obvious point, and yet, in most cases, our official poverty metrics fail...

Official poverty lines in Korea and other countries ignore the fact that unpaid household production contributes to the fulfillment of material needs and wants that are essential to attaining a minimum standard of living. By taking household work for granted, these official estimates provide an...

The Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty (LIMTCP) is a two-dimensional measure that takes into account both the necessary consumption expenditures and the household production time needed to achieve a minimum standard of living -- factors often ignored in official poverty...

Existing empirical schemas of class structure do not specify the capitalist class in an adequate manner. We propose a schema in which the specification of capitalist households is based on wealth thresholds. Individuals in non-capitalist households are assigned class locations based on their...

We examine the economic well-being of the elderly, using the Levy Institute Measure of EconomicWell-Being (LIMEW). The LIMEW is a comprehensive measure that incorporates broader definitions of income, from wealth, government expenditures, and taxes, than standard income and also includes the...

We analyze the relationship between wealth inequality and caste divisions in India using nationally representative surveys on household wealth conducted during 1991–92 and 2002–03. According to our findings, the groups in India that are generally considered disadvantaged (known as Scheduled...