Research on Economic Inequality – serie

This discussion is part of a series which aims to cover a broad spectrum of topics related to economic inequality. It discusses: is the size distribution of income stationary? Trade liberalization and the US living standard; inequality and unemployment; and, identifying low standards of living.

"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.

The emerging literature on experimental methods in connection with economic inequality has shed fresh light on how to think about inequality, how important issues of equality are in comparison with other economic objectives and how individuals incorporate criteria of equality and fairness into their own decisions. This volume covers a wide range of topics in the field of income distribution and extends the approach to related issues such as mobility and attitudes to risk. The selection of papers includes both participatory experiments - where individuals respond to economic incentives - and questionnaire experiments designed to investigate the extent to which individuals' values and attitudes conform to the way that economists and others conventionally model inequality and welfare.

"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 consists of a number of papers related to the theme of the dynamics of inequality and poverty. These are subdivided into four separate parts. The five chapters in Part I of this volume are concerned with inequality and poverty over extended time periods. Bandyopadhyay and Cowell deal with the concept of vulnerability in the context of income mobility of the poor. Biewen studies the extent and the composition of chronic poverty in Germany, comparing the results with the United Kingdom and the United States. Van de Ven describes a dynamic microsimulation model of cohort labour earnings based on the Australian population aged between 20 and 55 years, and considers how the widening social gap between the Australia and the UK is reflected by their redistributive systems, through the use of static and dynamic microsimulation. Kelly analyses the lifetime distribution of net worth in Australia using a dynamic microsimulation model to project the cross-sectional and lifetime asset holdings of a 5-year birth cohort over a period of 40 years. In Part II, the issue of intergenerational transfers of poverty is considered. Corak compares generational earnings mobility and the reasons for the degree to which the long run labour market success of children is related to that of their parents across countries. He provides a framework for understanding the underlying causal process as well as the conception of equality of opportunity, as a guide for public policy. Grawe uses data from the British National Childhood Development Study to examine the quality-quantity trade-off in fertility in multiple measures of child achievement. Maani examines the link between parental income and other resources during adolescent years, and higher education choices of the offspring at age 18, using a recent longitudinal data set from New Zealand. Part III is concerned with inequality over time. First, Wolff examines US inequality since the late 1940s, investigating the role of computer investment, dispersion of schooling and unionisation rate in the rise in inequality between 1968 and 2000. Second, Chotikapanich and Griffiths consider the question of testing for dominance in income distributions through the development of Bayesian methods of inference, which report on changes in income distributions in terms of the posterior probabilities. This allows an assessment of whether income distributions have changed over time. The final part of this volume is concerned with measurement issues. Makdissi and Wodon propose a measure of extreme poverty which is multidimensional in nature. It recognises the fact that there are interaction effects between different deprivations and that the length of time during which deprivations are felt may have a negative impact on household well-being. In the final contribution, Cowell examines Theil's approach to the measurement of inequality in the context of subsequent developments over recent decades. It focuses on the dynamics of inequality and poverty. It examines inequality and poverty over time, the intergenerational transfer of poverty, inequality over time, and measurement issues. The chapters discuss inequality and poverty in developed countries around the world, providing a multinational perspective.

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.

For equity, societies may wish to eliminate certain forms or manifestations of inequality. Horizontal equity and vertical equity in the income tax are topics which have interested me for some years. Although any shortfall from each of these objectives can be measured in terms of unwanted inequalities, equity per se is a different concept from equality. Equity relates to fairness, justice and other societal norms which give expression to the best aspirations of our collective social conscience. For example, equal access to health care for those in equal need is an accepted norm for horizontal equity in the health field. Vertical equity in this context means treating appropriately differently those who have different needs. The papers which are ultimately included in this volume are the ones, from among those offered, which survived a rigorous refereeing process. Each has its own take on the concept of equity, and its link with equality. Part of the "Research on Economic Inequality" series, 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 focuses on Equity.

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 contains both theoretical and applied on the concept of equality of opportunity which says that a society should guarantee its members equal access to advantage regardless of their circumstances, while holding them responsible for turning that access into actual advantage by the application of effort. Theoretical papers discuss to what extent some of the measures of inequality of opportunity meet the reward and the compensation principles, a new methodology for evaluating long-term income distributions, the implications of partial observability of individuals' circumstances on the measurement of inequality of opportunity and the advantages of applying segregation indices to study inequality in life chances. The applied work investigates how governments affect inequality of opportunity through the design of their tax and transfer schemes in 15 European countries, the changing role of circumstances for measuring inequality of opportunity in Chile, the existence of a poverty trap in Haiti and its consequences for equality of opportunity, and the correlation between circumstances and effort in the measurement of inequality of opportunity in U.S. during the period 1969-2007.

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.

Economists are increasingly turning their attention to the measurement and causes of health inequality. This is in response to widespread concern that health disparities reflect social injustices but is also part of the trend away from the narrow focus on inequality in income to the more encompassing analysis of inequality in wellbeing. Researchers interested in the extent and causes of variation in wellbeing cannot but turn their analytical gaze on health inequalities. This volume contains methodological and empirical contributions from leading experts in health economics and economic inequality that add further momentum to a thriving field of research. The focus is on methods for the measurement of health inequalities (income related, multidimensional and inequalities of opportunity) as well as the analysis of their causes. The collection is essential reading for researchers already working on health inequality and provides an immediate reconnaissance of the frontiers for those entering this exciting field.

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 papers in Measurement of Poverty, Deprivation, and Social Exclusion represent the most current research on poverty, deprivation, and income mobility. They illustrate the multidimensionality of poverty that is difficult to capture in any one measure. The volume presents state-of-the-art research that is relevant to poverty academics globally. The papers use a variety of methods that measure the persistence of poverty over time and cover numerous countries and circumstances. A selection of papers focus on single countries while others include comparisons of countries. The volume begins with a set of papers that examine particular groups that are most vulnerable to poverty and deprivation in a variety of places. These include measuring the persistence of poverty of immigrant children in Scandinavian countries. Finally the volume concludes with papers that analyze the relationships of two or more measures together to further elucidate what we know if we have only one measure of poverty.

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.

This volume contains research on how we measure poverty, inequality and welfare and how we use such measurements to devise policies to deliver social mobility. It contains ten papers, some of which were presented at the third meeting of The Theory and Empirics of Poverty, Inequality and Mobility at Queen Mary University of London, London, October 2016. The volume begins with theoretical issues at the frontier of the literature. Three papers discuss the impact of social welfare policies on poverty measurement, and with innovations on the measurement of relative bipolarisation. Two papers address the conceptualisation of multidimensional poverty by incorporating inequality within the poor, and that of chronic poverty for time dependent analyses, with applications to India and Haiti, and Ethiopia respectively. The second half of the volume consists of empirical contributions, using novel techniques and datasets to investigate the dynamics of poverty and welfare. These studies track the dynamics of poverty using unique datasets for China, the Caucasus and Italy. The volume concludes with investigations about within-household inequalities between siblings due to the unequal effects of conditional cash transfers in Cambodia and a cross-country study on the effect of historical income inequality on entrepreneurship in developing countries.

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.

There is a great deal of coverage on inequality, and the key determinants of recent trends are increasingly well-documented. However, much less is known about the driving forces behind international differences in inequality.The nine contributions collected in this book set out to examine the fundamental question of What Drives Inequality? These drivers may be so diverse and deep-rooted in the cultural, historical, or geographical characteristics of countries that one can hardly expect comprehensive models or clear-cut causal inference. Nevertheless, the research presented in this book unpacks the reasons behind the wide variations in inequality.Looking across country boundaries, chapters featured include in-depth insights into inequality in Europe, India, and the United States. It provides new results on the impact of public goods and services and on the role of demographic, labor market and, most importantly, fiscal policy determinants. It also brings fresh evidence and perspectives on the measurement of inequality, by examining wealth or broader measures of well-being, and provides some insights about potential "deeper drivers" such as individual perceptions, preferences, and beliefs about inequality and redistribution.

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.

This volume of Research on Economic Inequality contains research on how we measure poverty, inequality and welfare and how these measurements contribute towards policies for social mobility. The volume contains eleven papers, some of which focus on the uneven impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on poverty and welfare.Opening with debates on theoretical issues that lie at the forefront of the measurement of inequality and poverty literature, the first two chapters go on to propose new methods for measuring wellbeing and inequality in multidimensional categorical environments, and for measuring pro-poor growth in a Bayesian setting. The following three papers present theoretical innovations for measuring poverty and inequality, namely, in estimating the dynamic probability of being poor using a Bayesian approach, and when presented with ordinal variables.The next three chapters are contributions on empirical methods in the measurement of poverty, inclusive economic growth and mobility, with a focus on India, Israel and a unique longitudinal dataset for Chile. The volume concludes with three chapters exploring the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic as an economic shock on income and wealth poverty in EU countries and in an Argentinian city slum.

Research on Economic Inequality is a well-established publication of quality research. This 30th volume features insightful and original papers from the 9th Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) meeting.Mobility and Inequality Trends begins by illustrating the trajectory of income inequality in the world over the course of recent decades before the second paper makes a crucial distinction between ‘bad’ inequality, which is detrimental to society, and ‘good’ inequality, which is beneficial. Focus then shifts to bad inequality, one paper covering the relationship between intergenerational elasticity and inequality of opportunity, and the second studying the relationship between intergenerational mobility and life satisfaction in Spain. The volume then progresses to defend the use of intermediate views of inequality when constructing indicators of social welfare obtained through the use of average income and the Gini coefficient before investigating the advantage of using a multifaceted approach to income mobility measurement. To conclude Mobility and Inequality Trends presents an intensive exploration of income inequality in China and then studies the effects of the policy measure “Minimum Living Income. Finally, the last paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic stimulus policies.

Research on Economic Inequality is a well-established publication of quality research. Volume 31 provides original research on intergenerational earnings mobility, the factors determining adult health inequality, the evolution of wealth inequality in different regions of the world, inequality of employment opportunities, and the effects of the type of labour agreement on wage inequality and on an extended measure (income plus wealth) of well-being.Opportunity, Mobility and Inequality presents newly published, rich datasets and deepens our understanding of these issues, uncovering novel innovations around how we conceive and measure such economic entities.

Volume 16 of "Research on Economic" contains a selection of thirteen papers from the Second Biannual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, Berlin, July, 2007. This conference brings together both established scholars in the field of income distribution as well as advanced graduate students and new Ph.D's. The multi-day conference provides a forum for over 150 participants to share their work with one another. The papers contained in this volume are selected from a few of the many different sub-fields represented at the conference. As the title suggests a major emphasis of the volume is to collect work on the inequality of opportunity. An additional emphasis of the volume is on inequality measurement issues. Finally, the volume is designed to present work from both senior researchers and as well as emerging scholars. The volume begins with an essay on equal liberties by Serge-Christophe Kolm. The second paper examines the relationship between inequality and envy. The next four papers address the inequality of opportunities. Empirical studies of the equality of opportunity include Africa, Italy, Germany, and the United States. The measurement section also contains four papers. The topics covered in these papers include welfare analysis with ordinal data, unit consistency and multidimensional inequality indices, unit consistency and intermediate inequality indices, and the examination of two newly rediscovered inequality measures originally introduced by Bonferroni and De Vergotini. The volume also includes papers on the intergenerational transfer of income inequality and poverty in the US and Germany, income inequality and mobility in Argentina, the use of experimental methods to understand inequality aversion, and the recognition that measuring unemployment is an ethical problem, not simply an exercise in statistical measurement.