Fiscal Studies最新文献

Belgium exhibits a rather constant level of income inequality during the last decades, contrary to Germany, the United States and some Nordic countries, which have all faced substantial increases in inequality. We use the available income surveys from 1985 to 2020 to describe the evolution of income inequality by means of the Gini index. Earnings inequality has slightly decreased in the last two decades, at least if one takes into account the impact of the substantial increase in employment of, especially, older people and women. Though the education gap in earnings is widening, the rapid increase in (mostly female) education may have a dampening effect on earnings inequality. The income surveys largely underestimate financial capital incomes. Moreover, by definition, these do not cover undistributed profits of the corporate sector. When correcting for this, it turns out that pre-tax factor income inequality increased substantially between 2009 and 2016. The redistributive role of the welfare state through taxes has increased, while redistribution through the social security system exhibited a more irregular course. While there has been an increase in assortative matching in the last two decades, its impact on the evolution of income inequality is unclear.

Using data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, we provide the first estimates of intra-occupation sectoral hourly remuneration differentials in Britain. Focusing on healthcare, we find that public sector remuneration differentials for comparable workers vary substantially across occupations, with benchmark estimates from a premium of 34 per cent for care workers to no significant differential for medical secretaries. This variation, as well as differences in trends in intra-occupational estimates, illustrates the insights from intra-occupation estimates for government pay setting. Indeed, in stark contrast to national estimates of a relatively small public sector differential, we find sizeable and robust public sector premiums for doctors, auxiliary nurses and care workers.

We measure product market concentration and business dynamism in the UK from 1997 to 2020 and study the relationship with productivity. Our results show that concentration in the UK is increasing among narrow industries on average, but for a broad market definition, concentration and business dynamism are stable. We find a negative relationship between concentration and productivity for the average firm, but a positive relationship for the average worker. This occurs because higher industry concentration is associated with better allocative efficiency, measured by the proportion of workers in higher-productivity firms.

The Gini coefficient for disposable income for Canada in 2019 was approximately the same level it was at in 1995. Underlying this flat recent long-term pattern is an increase in the level of market earnings inequality in the 1980s and 1990s that Canada shared with other countries followed by a continuing period of flatness in that measure as well. This trend interacted with changes in policy that have, at times, offset earnings inequality trends and at other times exacerbated them. In this paper, we describe these trends and the combination of market and policy forces that drove them. We conclude that explanations rooted in ongoing technology or globalisation forces are less relevant than explanations based on deeper structural changes in the labour market. Those changes affecting earnings inequality were ultimately fully offset by changes in the tax and transfer system as well as labour market policies such as the minimum wage.

Using data on 17 countries in Europe and North America, we compare the career trajectories of mothers and fathers and of women and men without children across cohorts, and at different points of their life cycle. There is wide variation across countries in employment and earnings gaps at age 30. At age 50, however, the employment gap between mothers and non-mothers has closed in most countries. We also observe convergence in employment gaps between mothers and fathers by age 50, but these gaps do not fully close. Motherhood gaps in earnings also close by age 50 between mothers and non-mothers, particularly among the highly educated. But there is strong persistence in earnings gaps between mothers and fathers even among highly educated parents. The main reasons for the remaining gaps at later stages in the life cycle are part-time work among women and fatherhood premia as fathers' earnings outperform non-fathers' over their life cycle.

We investigate the progression of income inequality in Denmark over the years 1987–2021. During this time, we observe a consistent rise in inequality in household disposable income. This rise is influenced by shifts at both the high and low ends of the income spectrum, despite the fact that inequality in gross earnings remained unchanged up until 2008. The growing inequality in household disposable income coincides with various policy reforms aimed at enhancing incentives for employment. These changes include the reduction of the marginal tax rate on earned income and a decrease in the generosity of unemployment benefits and other forms of social assistance. At the same time, Denmark has experienced a noticeable increase in immigration, particularly from non-Western countries and Eastern Europe. Immigrants, who rely more heavily on social transfers, find themselves increasingly at the lower income levels. Our analysis underscores that while the policy reforms were designed to encourage employment, they have also led to heightened inequality in disposable income.

Ireland has experienced rapid – if volatile – growth over the last three decades. While this performance looks less impressive when considered over a longer horizon and is better seen as belated convergence making up for lost time in the first 50 years of independence, this paper highlights an aspect of the Irish experience that does stand out as quite remarkable: how broad-based and inclusive growth in household disposable income was. Drawing on over three decades of harmonised household survey data, we first show that income inequality fell substantially over this period, the product of disposable income growth that was stronger at the bottom than the middle or top of the distribution. We then tentatively suggest some important factors that might have contributed towards the patterns of growth experienced – including tax and transfer reforms, a rise in two-earner couples and a fall in the average size of households – before concluding with some directions for future research.

Finland is known for low income inequality by international comparison. In this paper we provide a long-run perspective on inequalities in Finland, and show that inequality is higher in the 21^st century compared with many previous decades. We discuss the drivers of inequality in more detail, focusing on wages, earnings, employment and education, and also social outcomes such as partner-finding and family formation in the working-age population. The collective wage-setting system is a likely contributor to the relatively low and stable wage and earnings inequality among working indviduals. However, women fare worse in the labour market than men, despite having a higher education level on average. We also find that individuals who are out of work or have low education have a lower probability of finding a partner, indicating that social inequalities are linked with those in the labour market. Finally, we discuss the importance of redistribution as well as changes in tax legislation that have contributed to an increasing concentration of capital income, which has been an important factor in increasing households’ disposable income inequality.

This paper documents how the inequality of household equivalent disposable income has changed in Sweden over the period 1990–2021. We find that income inequality has unambiguously increased. Measured by the Gini coefficient, inequality increased from around 0.19 to almost 0.3 by the end of 2020. We then analyse the backgrounds to this change by measuring the importance of changes in different components of the overall income distribution: the wage distribution; the distribution of hours of work; capital incomes; income differences between labour market participants and non-participants; income redistribution through income taxes and benefits; and, finally, the effect of increased immigration to Sweden.