Due to behavioral effects triggered by redistributional interventions, it is still an open question whether government policies are able to effectively reduce income inequality. We contribute to this research question by using different country-level data sources to study inequality trends in...

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint...

Many studies have estimated the effect of circumstances on income acquisition. Perhaps surprisingly, the fraction of inequality attributable to circumstances is usually quite small – in the advanced democracies, on the order of 20%. One reason for this is the lack of data on circumstance...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method allowing us to disentangle the policy effect from changing market incomes. Over the period 1979-2007, the cumulative policy effect aggravated inequality by increasing the income share of the top...

How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system...