Past climate change literature paid great attention to the welfare analysis of international agreements that stabilize emissions over time on the basis of the New Welfare Economics approach claiming “objective” measures of well-being and excluding interpersonal comparisons. In this paper, by...

The functioning of the labor market often has been stressed as a clear determinant in explaining poverty trends in developed countries. In this paper, we analyze the role of gender wage discrimination on household poverty rates in several EU countries, linking two related phenomena that rarely...

Households can differ in size and needs. A reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population. Ebert and Moyes (2003) and Shorrocks (2004) theoretically explore the properties...

The aim of this paper is to provide some empirical evidence about black-white differentials in the distribution of income and wellbeing in three different countries: Brazil, US and South Africa. In all cases, people of African descent are in a variety of ways socially disadvantaged compared with...

The analysis of growth patterns is a branch of research of great practical importance: the identification of factors that influence changes in the income distribution making them pro-poor or pro-rich can be a crucial element in the process of designing a social policy. It seems natural that...

In this paper, a new class of polarization measures is derived axiomatically. The concept of polarization is here identified with the decline of the middle class. In particular, we extend the definition of middle class towards a more realistic framework: the middle class is defined in terms of...

The paper proposes a method of identification of a growth pattern by analyzing the direct relation between income (or some other measure of wealth) of the poorer and of the richer. To this end the basic idea underlying Zenga’s concept of inequality measurement is applied. The proposed relative...

We estimate structural quantile treatment effects to analyze the relationship between household income and sorting into private or public education, using Italian data. Public education provision is redistributive when rich families, who contribute to its financing, find it optimal to sort out...

A widely accepted criterion for pro-poorness of an income growth pattern is that it should reduce a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equiproportionately. Inequality reduction is not generally seen as either necessary or sufficient for pro-poorness. As shown in...

Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which...