We study wage effects of two important elements of non-wage labour costs: firing costs and payroll taxes. We exploit a reform that introduced substantial reduction in these two provisions for unemployed workers aged less than 30 and over 45years who got a permanent job. A matching model with...

In recent years there has been an accumulation of empirical evidence suggesting that individuals dislike inequality. The literature has built upon estimating the degree of this dislike as well as its causes. The use of self-reported measures of satisfaction or well-being as a proxy for utility...

This paper is an attempt to translate empirically some of the categorizations of human development reviewed by Alkire (2002). It compares the estimates of human development obtained on the basis of Sen's (1985) capability approach, Narayan et al.'s (2000) dimensions of well-being, Cummins (1996)...

Starting from the axiomatization of polarization contained in <link rid="b10">Esteban and Ray (1994</link>) and <link rid="b7">Chakravarty and Majumder (2001</link>), we investigate whether people's perceptions of income polarization are consistent with the key axioms. This is carried out using a questionnaire-experimental approach that...

This paper examines the effect of income polarization on individual health. We argue that polarization captures much better the social tension and conflict that underlie some of the pathways linking income disparities and individual health, and which have been traditionally proxied by...

This paper provides a joint analysis of the output and distributional long-term effects of various fiscal policies in the UK, using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Our findings suggest that the long-term impact on GDP of increasing public spending and taxes is negative, and especially...

I analyse the dynamic structure of earnings in Great Britain for the period 1991-99 by decomposing the earnings covariance structure into its permanent and transitory components. According to the British Household Panel Study data, earnings inequality of male full-time employees increases over...