This article documents the historical trend of higher poverty rates in the South compared to the rest of the country. It examines any differences that might exist in how the poverty population in the country as a whole and the poverty population in the South respond to different economic and...

According to Malthus, there is an “Iron Law” for wages: they cannot stay above subsistence levels. When they do, increased population soon enough pushes them down to the previous level of immiseration. One might think that modern economics has long ago confined such views to the dustbin of...

In this study we look at distribution of wages to examine the extent and cause of the increasing wage inequality in Mexico over the two decades encompassing 1984 and 2000. To understand the causes of the increase in inequality over time we do a counterfactual analysis. We find that over the last...

In this paper I use the Malmö Longitudinal Data set and calculate actual lifetime earnings for the 1928 cohort of Malmö men. I compare distributions of, and the educational wage premiums for, annual and lifetime earnings. The distribution of lifetime earnings is found to be less than the...

This note presents an empirical analysis of optimal taxation in Chile, adopting Roemer’s equality of opportunities as the evaluation criterion. The equality of opportunities optimal tax rules seek to equalize income differentials arising from factors beyond the control of the individual....

Income replacement after retirement is an increasingly important economic policy area of social concern. This study examines three different measures of replacement income, including the effect of taxes on the estimated replacement rates of new retirees in the Health and Retirement Study. An...

The present study attempts to explain the difference in observed earning inequality between self-employment and wage-employment in Switzerland in 1992, 1995 and 2000. We use several measures of inequality in order both to determine the factors affecting income dispersion in the two groups and to...

Are those in poverty likely to remain there or can they move out of this situation without help from other sources? Our understanding of those in or near poverty is primarily based upon the analysis of either annual income or the income distribution from cross-sectional survey data. It has been...

We analyze wage growth and changes in wage inequality in eleven European countries between 1994 and 2001. The data base used throughout is the User Data Base (UDB) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The decomposition analysis is carried out independently for both genders....

In Finland, shifts in compensation have been of a kind comparable to those in the United States, similar but with a moderate, increasing wage variance between plants, an increasing gap between average non-productive- and productive-worker wages, and an increasing share of non-production workers....