A large empirical literature documents a rise in wage inequality in the American economy. Itis silent on whether the increase in inequality is due to greater heterogeneity in thecomponents of earnings that are predictable by agents or whether it is due to greateruncertainty faced by agents...

Differences in geopolitical regions of Nigeria are not debatable. However, there is no clearconsensus on the dimension of these disparities. In this paper, claims of geopolitical regiondisparities in labor market outcomes are investigated using survey data from Nigeria between1996-1999...

To assess the impact of tax-benefit policy changes on income distribution over time, wesuggest a methodology based on counterfactual simulations. We start by decomposingchanges in inequality/poverty indices into three contributions: reforms of the tax-benefitstructure (rules, rates, etc.),...

The emergence of a transitional labor market offers new opportunities to workers, but at thesame time bears the risk of (new) inequalities. This paper deals with unequal chances on thetransitional labor market in the Netherlands, in particular for workers from the four largestimmigrant groups:...

The March Current Population Survey (CPS) is the primary data source for estimation oflevels and trends in labor earnings and income inequality in the USA. Time-inconsistencyproblems related to top coding in theses data have led many researchers to use the ratio ofthe 90th and 10th percentiles...

We analyze the distribution and concentration of market incomes in Germany in the period1992 to 2001 on the basis of an integrated data set of individual tax returns and the GermanSocio-Economic Panel. The unique feature of this integrated data set is that it encompassesthe whole spectrum of the...

We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Ourresults show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of severalinterrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, andinfrastructure capital; the infusion of...

This paper presents and analyses the sharp increase in hourly wage inequality after 1998 inPoland. The increase was similar in magnitude to the much-studied increase in British wageinequality during the 1980s. Using data from the Polish Labour Force Survey, we find thisincrease to be associated...

Several countries have recently abolished or significantly reduced their taxes on bequests.Bequest taxes, on the other hand, were among the first to be introduced when modernsystems of taxation were developed at the end of the nineteenth century. We propose anexplanation for these facts which is...