This paper adopts a counterfactual decomposition analysis to analyse cross-country differences in the size of household wealth and levels of household wealth inequality. The findings of the paper suggest that the biggest share of cross-country differences is not due to differences in the...

Although most US income inequality research is based on public-use March CPS data, a new wave of research using IRS tax-return data reports substantially faster inequality growth for recent years. We show that these apparently inconsistent estimates are largely reconciled when the income...

In this paper we compare the level, composition and distribution of household wealth in five industrial countries: the UK, US, Italy, Finland and Sweden. We exploit the harmonized data within the Luxembourg Wealth Study, which we have extended to allow us to examine trends in the UK and the US...

The current poverty rate and the persistent poverty rate are both included in the EU’s portfolio of primary indicators of social inclusion. We show that there is a near-linear relationship between these two indicators across EU countries drawing on empirical analysis of EU-SILC and ECHP data....

This paper argues that our understanding of income and poverty dynamics benefits from taking a life cycle perspective. A person¿s age and family circumstances ¿ the factors that shape their life cycle ¿ affect the likelihood of experiencing key life events, such as partnership formation,...

This paper is motivated by the lack of any obvious relationship between aggregate poverty and unemployment in Great Britain. We derive a framework based on individuals' risks of unemployment and poverty, and how these vary over the economic cycle. Analysing the British Household Panel Survey for...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within the context of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerable households in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey and find that, of three different types of risks that we...

We focus on the statics and dynamics of poverty in Spain using data from the first eight waves of the European Community Household Panel from 1994 to 2001, a period not sufficiently covered by recent literature. The results confirm the pattern of poverty changes noted by other authors for the...

The intra-distributional mobility of German income dynamics is analysed using GSOEP. Transition probabilities are found to be time-varying. The tested models comprise various mixed Markov chains in discrete time and a non-stationary mover-stayer model is proposed. In order to explain the...