Documents Luxembourg Income Study 133 results

"This paper aims to relate the issue of the Motherhood Wage Penalty to the institutional framework “Varieties of Capitalism.” Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we perform cross-national analyses on the discrepancy in wages between mothers with young children and females without children. The second step of the analysis entails four different measures with relevance to both the institutional framework and our applied gender focus. We find that when nations exhibit features in line with “coordinated market economies,” characterized by relatively stubborn employment protection, smaller degree of general inequality, more concentrated wage bargaining, and higher rate of unionization, mothers are relatively more penalized in monetary terms compared to “liberal market economies.” The results add valuable insight to the limited gender literature within the framework and propose follow-up questions for expanding the efforts of gendering the Varieties of Capitalism."

"This paper explores common trends in inequality and redistribution across OECD countries from the late 1980s to 2013. Low?end inequality rises during economic downturns while rising top?end inequality is associated with economic growth. Most countries retreated from redistribution from the mid?1990s until the onset of the Great Recession and compensatory redistribution in response to rising unemployment was weaker in 2008?13 than in the first half of the 1990s. As unemployment and poverty risk have become increasingly become concentrated among workers with low education, middle?income opinion has become more permissive of cuts in unemployment insurance generosity and income assistance to the poor. At constant generosity, the expansion of more precarious forms of employment reduces compensatory redistribution during downturns because temporary employees do not have the same access to unemployment benefits as permanent employees."

"Though extensive research has described the prevalence of educational assortative mating, the causes of its variation across countries and over time is not well understood. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database, I investigate the impact on marital sorting of both inequality between educational strata and increasing gender parity in the labor and educational markets. I find that in countries with greater returns to education, the odds of any sort of union that crosses educational boundaries is substantially reduced. However, there is only modest evidence of a relationship between returns to education and marital sorting within countries. I find that across countries, gender parity in educational attainment is related to reduced odds of female hypergamy and to increased odds of male hypergamy. Labor market parity between males and females appears to explain little of the variance in marital sorting by education either between or within countries."

"Existing research shows that women's employment patterns are not so much driven by gender, as by gendered parenthood, with childless women and men (including fathers) employed at substantially higher levels than mothers in most countries. We focus on the cross-national variation in the gap in employment participation and working time between mothers and women without children in the same household. This variation remains salient, even when we control for individual and household-level factors, such as human capital, partnered status, and household income. We provide evidence that institutional and cultural contexts shape their opportunities in important ways: more generous paid leaves, publicly supported childcare services for very young children, and cultural support for maternal employment predict lower differences in employment participation and working hours between mothers and childless women, while the length of job protected leave is associated with larger motherhood employment gaps."

"This paper combines national accounts, survey and tax data to provide consistent series on income distribution in Poland over the 1983-2015 period. We find that official survey-based inequality estimates substantially underestimate the rise of inequality since the end of Communism. The top 10% income share increased from 23% to 40% and the top 1% income share from 4% to 14% between 1989 and 2015. Frequently quoted Poland's transition success has largely benefited top income groups. Over this period, top 1% has captured almost twice as large portion of the total income growth than the bottom 50% (24% versus 13%). We also find that inequality has continued to grow after the initial upward adjustment during the transition in the 1990s, especially since the early 2000s, and today has reached levels found in more unequal European countries. However, the transition from communism to capitalism has led to lower income concentration in Poland than in Russia. We relate this to different transition policies, institutions and natural resources endowments."

"Single-parent families face unique challenges when it comes to in-work poverty. Without a second caregiver and earner, single parents have to compete with dual-earner couples for their position in the earnings distribution. Facing precarious employment and gendered wage inequality, single-parent families face a high risk to experience poverty even when they are working. This chapter presents empirical evidence on in-work poverty and inadequate wages in the policy context of 18 OECD countries. The impact of family structure, occupation, regulations of part-time work, paid parental leave, and various redistributive policies are examined. We distinguish three distinct patterns of performance in countries' approach to in-work poverty among single parents: A balanced approach of ensuring low inequality on the labor market combined with redistribution, an unbalanced approach of combating in-work poverty mostly through redistribution, and an approach in which high inequality on the labor market is compensated with redistributive policies only to a very limited extent. Countries that rely on a balanced approach to reduce inequality on the labor market, both with respect to class and gender, combined with an adequate level of redistribution, seem best situated for a durable reduction of poverty among working single parents."

"The living conditions and well-being of the middle class are traditionally considered an expression of how society is progressing. Yet growing inequality and the polarization of incomes observed in Western countries due to globalization, the recession and rapid technological change, is leading to what has been described as a “malaise of the middle class”. This article presents the evolution of the income distribution in selected Western countries and discusses the possible impact of the threat created by downward mobility and the erosion of the middle class in today's society."

"This article disaggregates high and low status care work, based on the degree of “social closure” in a given caring occupation, across six liberal welfare regimes: Australia, Canada, Ireland, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Bolstering the argument that there is a “migrant in the market” model of employment unique to liberal welfare regimes, the data demonstrate that foreign-born individuals are more likely to perform low status, precarious care work within each country than the native-born and that migrant workers experience an overall wage penalty in the labour force, as well as there being an additional penalty for those who perform service work in the realms of education and health."

"We study the effect of power sharing over income redistribution among different socio-economic groups in a model of redistributive politics with fairness concern. We prove that a unique pure-strategy equilibrium exists under fairly general conditions; and we show that equilibrium transfers depend on the interplay of four main factors: (i) the gap between the population and the group average pre-tax income; (ii) the relative ideological neutrality of the poor, (iii) parties' and voters' concern with income inequality, and (iv) the proportionality of the electoral rule. A number of comparative statics predictions emerge from our characterization. Among them, our analysis shows that the net transfers to the middle class and the rich (resp., the poor) increase (resp., decrease) with power sharing disproportionality. Further, we prove that the Gini coefficient associated with the distribution of disposable incomes also rises with the disproportionality of the power sharing rule, which amount to say that income inequality rises as policymaking power gets more concentrated in the majority winning party. We confront these predictions to the data, using an unbalanced panel of developed and developing democracies. The empirical evidence strongly supports both, the positive effect of the income gap over the group transfers, and the relationship between the Gini index (and respectively, the group transfers) and power sharing disproportionality."

"Using a rich dataset on over 110,000 workers from nine European countries and the USA we study the wage response to industry dependence on foreign value added. We estimate a Mincerian wage model augmented with an input-output interindustry linkages measure accounting for task heterogeneity across workers. Low and mediumeducated workers and those performing routine tasks experience (little) wage decline due to major dependency of their industries on foreign inputs. Workers from former EU15 are more in danger of unfavourable wage effects than workers from new EU member states. American workers employed in service industries are more exposed than manufacturing workers."