We interpret social transfers broadly as a set of measures to reduce or relieve poverty, and study how well this purpose is served in the countries that participated in the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions in 2007. Motivated by the findings, we characterise a social...

In view of rising wage and income inequality, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.50 € per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts...

Using counterfactual microsimulations, Shapley decompositions of time change in inequality and poverty indices make it possible to disentangle and quantify the relative effect of tax-benefit policy changes, compared to all other effects including shifts in the distribution of market income....

This paper evaluates the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY) to the pandemic. Additional years spent in poverty (PY) are conservatively...

The Greek crisis was the deepest and longest ever recorded in an OECD country in the postwar period. Output declined by over a quarter and disposable income by more than 40%, while the unemployment rate exceeded 27%. The paper explores the effects of the crisis on the level and the structure of...

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)...

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...

Contrary to conventional wisdom, NHANES data indicate that the poor have never had a statistically significant higher prevalence of overweight status at any time in the last 35 years. Despite this empirical evidence, the view that the poor are less healthy in terms of excess accumulation of fat...

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...