Typically, the study of post-war convergence has primarily focused on convergence in per capita incomes. By investigating convergence at population class means we can characterize convergence as either "equal" or "unequal" depending upon whether the (inverse) income distribution functions are...

The recent adoption of the Delors Report brings into question the extent of the EC integration and the costs to individual countries of continued integration. In this paper we address this question by comparing EC countries to non-EC countries, specifically comparing the extent to which domestic...

Micro data from audited tax returns are used to evaluatechanges in the actual progressitivity of U.S. federal incometaxes in 1979 and 1988, which is distinct from apparent progressivity.Statistical inference methods are applied to global measuresof both actual and apparent residual and liability...

This paper comments on the work of Rector et al. (1999a, 1999b). The poverty lines implicit in their restrictive material deprivation approach are disputed and the claim that America has triumphed over poverty is rejected. Evidence is presented showing that poverty among the poorest Americans...

This paper develops and applies new measures of poverty that overcome a number of specific methodological flaws in the official US poverty statistics. Sen's distribution sensitive index of poverty and each of its components are estimated at several distinct poverty thresholds for the period...

Lilliard, Smith and Welch (1986) note the rising proportion of workers whose earnings go unreported in the Current Population Survey and argue that the Census Bureau's imputation procedure fails to account for the positive correlation between nonresponse and income. As a consequence, an...

Some participants in income and labor market surveys fail to report their earnings. We use data on imputed and reported wages for the same workers, taken from the 1988 change in the CPS processing system to compare actual earnings to both hot-deck and earnings-equations imputations. Our results...

This paper develops distribution-free statistical inference procedures to test for changes in tax progressivity. Tests for both the Reynolds-Smolensky index of residual progression and the Kakwani index of liability progression are provided. Changes in tax progressivity in three Western...