The recent debate on trends in inequality in industrial countries has been marred by the lack of consensus about the relevant concept of inequality. Labour economists are concerned with inequality in earnings, macroeconomists with movements in the wage share, while policy-makers tend to focus on...

Recent work on inequality has examined either changes in the distribution of income or in that of earnings, without examining how the latter affects the former. In this paper we perform a factor decomposition of income inequality in order to assess the importance of earnings and income from...

The US has exceptionally high inequality of disposable household income (i.e., income after accounting for taxes and transfers). Among working-age households (those with no persons over age 60), that high level of inequality is caused by a high level of market income inequality (i.e., income...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the regional disparities of six decentralized countries using LIS microdata. In order to determine the extent of the territorial variable in the explanation of income inequality, we carry out two complementary analyses. On the one hand, we perform the...

The relationship between income inequality and polarization is an empirical fact: a change in equality might occur together with a change in polarization. At the same time, polarization might emerge while inequality remains constant. The outcome of this process entails relevant information about...

This paper presents findings on the changing effectiveness of cash transfers and income taxes on inequality and poverty reduction in four EU countries - the UK, Italy, Sweden and France. We use long time series (spanning four decades) to examine trends within countries over time and between...

This paper introduces a series of augmentations to the Current Population Survey to allow for more accurate estimations of American poverty outcomes and a more fruitful integration of the U.S. into comparative research. The augmentations address three shortcomings in recent poverty research,...

This paper uses data from 14 Middle Income Countries in the Luxembourg Income Study database to examine the position of children in the income distributions, and to calculate child poverty prevalence, to assess how far children receive transfers from state social protection systems compared to...

Incomes in surveys suffer from various measurement problems, most notably in the tails of their distributions. We study the prevalence of negative and zero incomes, and their implications for inequality and poverty measurement relying on 57 harmonized surveys covering 12 countries over the...

This paper explores common trends in inequality and redistribution across OECD countries from the late 1980s to 2013. Low-end inequality rises during economic downturns while rising top-end inequality is associated with economic growth. Most countries retreated from redistribution from the...