This study looks at women’s standard of living immediately after divorce or separation. It finds that women who had a higher standard of living tend to lose more from divorce or separation. At the same time, overall income inequality among separated women increases. The researchers compared the household incomes of separated women to a hypothetical … Read more
Union dissolution and income inequality among separating women
Can We Really Rely on Income Distribution Statistics? Some Issues in the Swedish Data
The Swedish Income Distribution Statistics have shown rising gaps in disposable income since the early 1980s. Several reports have shown that capital income is an important driver behind this development. I identify several weaknesses in the measurement of capital income in these statistics. One weakness is that realised capital gains, which generally are included in … Read more
No stratified effect of unemployment on incomes. How the market, state and household compensate for income loss in the UK and Switzerland
This paper looks at the loss of income in the two years after unemployment in the UK and in Switzerland and finds that while lower income groups are more vulnerable to becoming unemployed they are not necessarily more vulnerable to its consequences. The researchers used data on more than 35,000 people who took part in … Read more
Effect of Genetic Propensity for Obesity on Income and Wealth Through Educational Attainment
This paper shows that a genetic propensity to obesity affects women more than men in the labour market. The research draws on a representative sample of almost 6,000 Americans aged 50-65 and not yet retired from the US Health and Retirement Study. It looks at factors such as individual income, household wealth, health and retirement … Read more
Wages, Experience and Training of Women over the Lifecycle
This paper finds that on-the-job training can help mitigate some of the negative career effects of having children, especially for women who left education at the end of high school. The researchers used data from 18 waves of the British Household Panel Survey between 1991 and 2008, which contains information on the employment, education, training … Read more
Family Life Courses, Gender, and Mid-Life Earnings
This paper suggests that extensive Nordic family friendly policies designed to support work – family balance and to increase social and gender equality do not achieve the aim of minimising earnings inequalities between men and women and between different family types. Using Finnish register data on 6,621 men and 6,330 women born between 1969 and … Read more
Rent Sharing and Inclusive Growth
This paper looks at the extent to which wages are affected by profits in major British firms – a process known as ‘rent-sharing.’ It finds this happens on a much smaller scale today than it did in the 1980s and 1990s. The researchers used data from a panel of the top 300 publicly-quoted British companies … Read more
Between Communism and Capitalism: Long-term Inequality in Poland, 1892-2015
This paper looks at the evolution of inequality in Poland from the late 19th Century to the early 21st Century, by constructing the long-term distribution of income in Poland from combining tax, household survey and national accounts data. It documents a U-shaped evolution of inequalities from the end of the 19th century until today: (i) … Read more
Divorce and Diverging Poverty Rates: A Risk‐and‐Vulnerability Approach
This study offers a new approach to analyzing life course inequalities and applies it to the link between divorce and poverty. Previous research has suggested that divorce drives cumulative inequality between education groups during the life course. Two pathways play a role in this process: the educational gradient in the risk of divorce and the … Read more
Family Size and the Persistency of Poverty following Divorce: The United States in Comparative Perspective
This paper assesses how the short- and medium-term economic consequences of divorce on women vary by family size. It finds, surprisingly, that having children contributes to a woman’s economic recovery in the medium term. The researchers made use of household survey data in the US, UK, Germany, Australia and Switzerland and advanced modelling techniques to … Read more