In Capital in the Twenty-First Century , Thomas Piketty uses what he calls “the second fundamental law of capitalism” to predict that wealth-to-income ratios are poised to increase dramatically as economies’ growth rates fall during the twenty-first century. This law states that in the long run the wealth-to-income ratio equals s/g, where s is the economy’s saving rate and g its growth rate. We...

We exploit an exhaustive administrative dataset that includes the individual tax returns of all households in the top percentile of the income distribution in Germany to pin down the effective income taxation of households with very high incomes. Taking tax base erosion into account, we find that the top percentile of the income distribution pays an effective average tax rate of 30.5 percent an...

This study examines income mobility amongst older people in Great Britain and Germany after retirement. The motivation is that older people may be subject to greater income risks in today’s environment of early exits from the labour force, rising longevity and increasing reliance on private pension income. Our results provide evidence that income mobility amongst older people is more pronounced...

This paper is concerned with distributive aspects of crucial economic and institutional reforms experienced by income sources in Uruguay after the late eighties. These reforms involved both, the labor market and the pensions system, and we provide empirical evidence about the different way they affected the distribution of income. The distribution of income across all earners at the end of the ...

The relative income-health hypothesis postulates that income distribution is one of the key determinants of population health. The discussion on the age and gender patterns of this association is still open. We test the relative income-health hypothesis using a panel data covering 21 developed countries for over 30 years. We find that net of trends in GDP per head and unobserved period and coun...

OBJECTIVE To determine how the capacity and viability of local health care safety nets changed over the last six years and to draw lessons from these changes. DATA SOURCE The first three rounds (May 1996 to March 2001) of Community Tracking Study site visits to 12 communities. STUDY DESIGN Researchers visited the study communities every two years to interview leaders of local health care sy...

Policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions are likely to increase the prices for fossil fuel based energy. Higher energy prices would raise farmers' expenditure on machinery fuels, irrigation water, farm chemicals, and grain drying. To compute the economic net impacts of increased farm input costs on agricultural production after market adjustment, we employ a price endogenous sector model f...

To compute the net profits in a Net Profit Deal, the record company deducts off the top its actual outof-pocket costs for recording, manufacturing, promotion, marketing, etc. Some labels also deduct a so-called “Overhead Fee” of 10 to 15% of the gross record sales income. After the record company deducts all of these expenses and reimburses itself, the label then pays the artist whatever percen...