John A. Bishop - Böcker

This research investigates the impact of three equal cost alternative labour market policies on the economic well-being of low-income families and society in general at the turn of the 21st century. The principal focus is on how changes in the minimum wage, Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and payroll taxes influence the well-being of low-income American families. The methods we employ also reveal how much of the benefits from raising the minimum wage, increasing the EITC, and reducing payroll taxes of workers in low-income families accrue to families in the middle and upper ranges of the income distribution. Thus, we consider the entire distribution, but focus primary attention on families and persons at or near the bottom of the income distribution. The research reported in this book has three distinguishing features.First, it examines and compares changes in the minimum wage, the EITC, and payroll taxes using a common analytical framework. There is considerable discussion of the impacts of raising the minimum wage and increasing EITC payments. The research reported here places these two policies in an 'equivalent social cost' framework and analyses the distributional consequences of each policy. In addition, we use the same equivalent cost paradigm to investigate an alternative policy that rebates a portion of the payroll taxes paid by workers in low-income families. A second distinguishing feature of the research is that it incorporates important insights from the poverty and income distribution literature into the analysis of labour market policies and family well-being.This literature suggests that any evaluation of success or failure of poverty fighting policies that increase the minimum wage, expand the EITC, or reduce payroll taxes requires that the poor population be properly identified and poverty measured using distribution sensitive measures of poverty and not simple headcounts of the poor. Further, it is important to check for the sensitivity of any conclusions about the policy choices to alternative poverty lines. A third distinguishing feature of the research is that we use important developments in the applied welfare economics of income distribution to address the key question: Which policy alternative is best?

"Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 10, Fiscal Policy, Inequality and Welfare" contains ten papers, both theoretical and applied, on tax progressivity and tax and transfer equity. Theory topics covered include consumption tax equity, alternative definitions of tax progressivity, horizontal equity and reranking. The applied work includes studies of Australia's consumption taxes, Israel's national insurance tax system, Mexican transfer system, Canadian tax equity, trends in US tax and transfer progressivity and a study of the impact of the repeal of the US marriage tax penalty.

"Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 12" is the outgrowth of University of Alabama Poverty and Inequality conference, May 22-25, 2003. The motivation for the conference was to honor John P. Formby upon his retirement. The conference, funded by the University, was designed to bring together three groups of people; first, some of the most recognized scholars in the field, second, current and former colleagues of John Formby's working in this field, and third, Dr. Formby's former PhD and post-doctoral students. Seventeen papers were presented, eleven of which are authored or co-authored by Dr. Formby's former students. Peter Lambert and Yoram Amiel also participated in the conference. Dan Slottje, John Creedy, Shlomo Yitzhaki and Quentin Wodon did not attend but contributed papers. The first two papers in Volume 12 examine the impact of the minimum wage. The Formby-Bishop-Kim paper compares the poverty reducing effects of the minimum wage to two alternative poverty reducing policies. In the Cover-Kim paper, the authors control for local cost of living to gauge the impact of the minimum wage on teenage employment. The third and fourth papers apply experimental methods to study respondent's attitudes toward inequality and risk. The Beckman et al. paper asks whether the failure to reliably observe inequality aversion (in experiments) extends to risk aversion. In the fifth paper, Buhong Zheng investigates the properties of "intermediate" measures of inequality. The paper questions, whether these measures maintain their intermediateness through inequality neutral transformations, and the unit consistency of these measures. In the sixth paper, Bishop-Chow-Zeager extend their earlier work on Lorenz curve decompositions. The decomposed Lorenz curve can be easily used to construct interdistributional Lorenz curve measures of economic advantage among subgroups. Using U.S. data they find smaller economic advantages over time by race and region, although not by marital status. In the seventh paper, Yitzhaki and Wodon observe that mobility is the transition between two inequality states and establish the equivalence of the Gini index with the Atkinson-Plotnik measure of horizontal equity. They illustrate their results with data from rural Mexico. The eighth and ninth papers address tax microsimulation modeling. Creedy-Kalb-Scutella compare alternative approaches to measuring poverty and inequality in a discrete hours model.

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the first meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ). The Societys aims are to provide an international forum for all researchers interested in the study of economic inequality and related fields, bringing together the diversity of perspectives. The conference was held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain in July 2005. Over eighty parallel sessions were offered, providing novel and interesting work from both mature scholars and as well as new PhDs. With so much quality work from which to choose, it was necessary to limit the scope of Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 14.The first five papers all employ Spanish data and cover topics such as child poverty, social preferences toward redistribution, social exclusion, and multidimensional poverty. The next three papers examine inequality in the EU using alternative methodologies. Chapter Nine explores poverty dynamics among the elderly in Italy. Chapter Ten presents and extends the state of the art in multidimensional inequality measurement. Chapters Eleven and Twelve contribute to the theoretical underpinnings of inequality measurement. Chapters Thirteen through Fifteen contain analytical papers focused on evaluating the effects of public policy on poverty and inequality. The final two chapters use the questionnaire-experimental approach to examine individuals distributional preferences. This book is part of the "Research on Economic Inequality" series. It presents papers form the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ). It provides an international forum for all researchers interested in the study of economic inequality and related fields. It brings together a diversity of perspectives.

This volume contains papers from the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality's third meeting held in Buenos Aries, Argentina, in July 2009. The first five papers focus on a number of Latin American countries, on the understudied topics of poverty and inequality in these areas. Specific issues covered by these papers include multidimensional poverty, equity effects of school drop-outs, and the role of transfer programs in reducing Latin American poverty. Additional papers provide research from further afield including China and France and cover topics such as: relative deprivation; taxation and inequality; mobility dominance; polarization; estimation of child costs; nutritional inequality; and, transportation inequalities. The volume includes work by such well-known authors as Jacques Silber, Jean-Yves Duclos, and Udo Ebert. This book is the 18th Volume in the notable Research on Economic Equality series which offers fresh theoretical and methodological insights into the key issues in the field of economic inequality, showcasing highly topical work from both senior researchers and emerging scholars.

This volume honors the lifetime and continuing contributions of Professor Jacques Silber. The book contains 15 papers, which were presented at the Fourth Meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, Catania, Sicily, July 2011. Theoretical topics covered in Volume 20 include measuring segregation, welfare and liberty, the use of influence functions in distributional analysis, and the axiomatic approach to multidimensional inequality. Empirical studies include occupational and residential segregation, regional convergence, impact of variable of equivalence scales on income inequality, earnings and educational inequality and mobility, poverty transitions, and welfare reform. These empirical studies examine a variety of countries and cultures: Afro-Latinos, Italian immigrants, and Indian states as well as the European Union and the United States.

Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 22 begins with papers of widespread interest on the impact of the Great Recession. The first paper addresses the impact of "asset meltdown" on the wealth of the US middle class, with disparate racial and ethnic impacts. The second studies poverty and inequality in the US in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The next topic is on the evolution of poverty and inequality in the world. One paper proposes a new methodology to measure global poverty and inequality, while the second analyzes the importance of considering not only the desperately poor but also those just above the subsistence level. Great interest for inequality researchers lies on the use of wealth data. Two approaches to this issue are presented. Firstly, several papers study wealth inequality directly. Secondly, a paper uses annuitized wealth data to augment the income measure of economic well-being. An emerging field in the study of economic well-being is the use of self-reported status and perceptions data. Three papers employ this type of data, investigating happiness inequality, perception of income inequality, and the existence of a "Great Gatsby Curve" for job mobility.

The essays in this series offer fresh theoretical and methodological insights into the key issues in the field of economic inequality. The content is comprised of highly topical subject matter with key researchers in the field contributing.

Research on Economic Inequality, volume 26, primarily contains papers presented at the 8th Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) meeting. The papers cover such topics as the effect of inheritance taxation on the "pre-distribution" of income, and tax progressivity under alternative inequality definitions. Other papers address the evolution of wealth inequality (Piketty's "r-g"), the decomposition of the determinants of wage bi-polarization, a multidimensional analysis of food insecurity in Israel, and the "paradox of progress" (educational) in Latin America. Three papers address the intergenerational transmission of inequality, two of which focus on Europe and one which considers a wide variety of countries. The final two papers explore inequality (mis) perceptions and the influence of the political structure on stated inequality preferences.

Research on Economic Inequality is a well-established publication of quality research. This 28th volume features insightful and original papers from the 8th Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) meeting.The first paper of this volume illustrates the trajectory of income inequality in wealthy countries over the course of recent decades, while the second carries out a comprehensive assessment of income redistribution through taxes and transfers across OECD countries over the last two decades. The next two papers cover the topic of income mobility, one interpreting the Bartholomew index of mobility in terms of a directional mobility index, and the second providing a framework for the measurement of income mobility over a range of time periods. A fifth paper studies the potential equalization of rising educational attainment. The next paper investigates the effect the number of children within different age groups has on poverty. In the seventh, it is shown that a social planner who seeks to efficiently reduce the aggregate relative deprivation of the population, coincides with the Rawlsian social planner. Finally, the last paper generalizes the Oaxaca-Blinder approach to measure wage discrimination under imperfect information.