This Note belongs to the recent literature emphasizing that the residual in the traditional Gini index decomposition reveals more than what is commonly believed. We show that the residual reveals the so far unexplored contribution of stratification to between-group inequality, and this suggests...

In view of rising poverty rates, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide minimum wage of 7.50e per hour based on a micro-simulation model accounting for interactions between wages, the...

Redistributing incomes has always been one of the main goals of Iranian policy makers, although political regimes have changed frequently between 1991 and 2004. We have applied a microsimulation using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and a Heckman correction for sample selection bias to compare...

Inequality is transmitted intergenerationally because the outcomes of parents and their children are correlated. The correlation may be due to inherited, economic, and/or contextual factors. A structural model is proposed in which parents affect their children directly through their own...

This article analyzes the impact of risk on decisions made by the poor within the context of the Individual Development Account (IDA) program. IDA is a matched savings program designed to help low-income households invest in appreciating assets. For these households, the risk involved with...

Over the last 100 years, a large number of distributions has been proposed for the modeling of size phenomena, notably the size distribution of personal incomes. The most widely known of these models are the Pareto, log-normal, generalized log-normal, generalized Gamma, generalized Beta of the...

Poverty and inequality are often estimated from grouped data as complete household surveys are neither always available to researchers nor easy to analyze. In this study we assess the performance of functional forms proposed by Kakwani (1980a) and Villasenor and Arnold(1989) to estimate the...

The dearth of studies on quantitative determinants of poverty in Nigeria is a major weak point in the country’s poverty reduction policy and strategy formulation. A recent study in Kogi State of Nigeria revealed that poverty is higher among households that have male heads, are polygamous, have...

An understanding of the financial and distributional consequences of Social Security reform requires knowledge about the actual life circumstances of participants, including the level and pattern of their lifetime earnings and their age at retirement. Some analyses of Social Security reform make...

Argentina constitutes an interesting case to be analyzed because during the 1990s, it achieved high rates of growth jointly with significant increases in unemployment and poverty. This document studies the dynamics of Argentine poverty between 1991 and 2003, analyzing the impact of different...