While the buzz around income inequality is reaching a crescendo, income data may not be the best measure of overall welfare. Instead, analyzing household consumption reveals that inequality is not as pervasive as skewed public discourse portrays it.

While the buzz around income inequality is reaching a crescendo, income data may not be the best measure of overall welfare. Instead, analyzing household consumption reveals that inequality is not as pervasive as skewed public discourse portrays it.

Meyer and Sullivan examine income inequality between 1963 and 2014 using the Current Population Survey and consumption inequality between 1960 and 2014 using the Consumer Expenditure Survey.

This paper studies the relationship between inequalities in working hours and overall earnings inequality in Germany between 2006 and 2014, and the role of declining collective bargaining coverage. Using data from the German Structure of Earnings Survey (GSES), a variance decomposition of...

This paper explores how the diversity of minimum wage systems affects earnings inequalities within European countries. It relies on the combination of (a) harmonized micro-data from household surveys, (b) data on national statutory minimum wages and coverage rates, and (c) hand-collected...

Income inequality has been lower in periods when trade unionism has been strong. Using observations on wages by occupation, by geography, and by gender in collective bargaining contracts from the 1940s to the 1970s, patterns in movements of wage differentials are revealed. As wages increased,...

We study the distributional effect of a wage indexation mechanism - the Scala Mobile (SM) - that heavily compressed the distribution of Italian wages during the 1970s and 1980s. The SM imposed large real wage increases at the bottom of the distribution and was essentially irrelevant for...

We examine the evolution of the Swedish wage distribution over the periods 1968-1981 and 1981-2000. The first period was the heyday of the Swedish solidarity wage policy with strongly equalization clauses in the central wage agreements. During the second period, there was more scope for...