As far as standard measures of income inequality are concerned, the Nordic countries rank among the most equal economies in the world. This paper studies whether and how this picture changes when the focus is on inequality of income composition, meaning the heterogeneity in individuals’ factor...

The openness to international trade and capital movements of industrialized countries has increased substantially during the recent decades. At the same time, most of these countries experienced a rise in income dispersion. Against this background, the paper analyzes empirically whether the...

This paper uses national accounts data to adjust market and disposable Top 10% and Top 1% household survey income shares for 39 developed and developing countries that are part of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). An additional novelty of this study is the distinction between labor and capital...

This paper explores the ability of some popular income distributions to model observed skewness and kurtosis. We present the generalized beta type 1 (GB1) and type 2 (GB2) distributions' skewness-kurtosis spaces and clarify and expand on previously known results on other distributions'...

We examine the extent to which declining manufacturing employment may have contributed to increasing inequality in advanced economies. This contribution is typically small, except in the United States. We explore two possible explanations: the high initial manufacturing wage premium and the high...

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...

Not everybody is benefiting equally from rising mean incomes. We discuss the mean-income population share (MPS), defined as the population share earning less than the mean income, as an indicator of how representative the mean income is for the mass of the population. This measure is both...

In the distributive analysis, the constant relative inequality aversion utility function is a standard tool for ethical judgements of income distributions. The sole parameter ε of this function expresses a society’s aversion to inequality. However, the profession has not committed to the...

The aim of this paper is to compare the economic situation of young retirees with their peers who decided to continue their working life before and during the recent economic crisis using the micro-data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database (LIS) for four countries (Greece, Spain, the UK and...

This paper investigated the link between inflation and the top decile income share after the global financial crisis. The analysis was done on a sample of 42 countries. We found that higher inflation has reduced the income going to the top decile. The main explanation is that inflation has...