Using a newly available comprehensive micro-data set we examine changes in the shape of the Brazilian income distribution during the "lost decade" of the 1980s. We adopt alternative parametric and non-parametric approaches to modelling the distribution. We show that inequality changed...

This paper takes a skeptical view of the theory that the slight decline in young women's labor-force participation from 1985 to 1990 can be explained by the fact that there are fewer women now in their early twenties than there are men in their late twenties so that women currently have more...

Undesirable outputs are often produced together with desirable outputs. This joint production of good and bad outputs brings about a difficulty for productivity measurement. Here we introduce a directional distance function and use it as a component in a new productivity index. This index, as an...