We examine the impact of family income during childhood on the type of secondary school that German children attend, a good indicator of their lifetime socioeconomic attainment. By contrast with several US child outcome studies, we find that late-childhood income is a more important determinant...

In response to a growing interest in comparing inequality levels and trends across countries, a number of cross-national inequality databases are now available. These databases differ considerably in purpose, coverage, data sources, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and quality of documentation....

Rising income inequalities are widely debated in public and academic discourse. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by proposing a new family of measures of unfair inequality. To do so, we acknowledge that inequality is not bad per se, but that its underlying sources need to be taken...

Using representative income and time use-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from home production and analyse their impact on economic inequality. As an alternative to existing measures, we propose a predicted wage approach based...

This paper discusses data used in publishing statistics on earnings, the distribution of household income and poverty in China by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) which is widely used by policy makers, international agencies and researchers. Unlike many other countries, China until...

This paper provides a self-contained introduction to the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), concentrating on aspects relevant to analysis of the distribution of household income. I discuss BHPS design features and how data on net household income are derived. The BHPS net household income...

Equality of opportunity is an important normative ideal of distributive justice. In spite of its wide acceptance and economic relevance, standard estimation approaches suffer from data limitations that can lead to both downward and upward biased estimates of inequality of opportunity. These...

Society drifts apart in many dimensions. Economists focus on income of the poor and rich and the distribution of income but a broader spectrum of dimensions is required to draw the picture of multiple facets of individual life. In our study of multidimensional polarization we extend the income...

Income inequality is on the rise, and everyone, from President Obama and Pope Francis to Prince Charles and Standard & Poor's, is talking about it. But these conversations about what are arguably the most significant changes in the distribution of incomes and earnings since the 1940s are leading...

Using nationally representative longitudinal survey, we examine the income mobility among rural (urban) Indian households over 1993-2004 and 2004-2011 (2004-2011). We find mobility estimates that mirror the social hierarchy: Forward Hindu Caste (FHC) households experienced the highest (lowest)...