This paper draws upon influence function regression methods to determine where foreign workers stand in the distribution of private sector wages in Luxembourg, and assess whether and how much their wages contribute to wage inequality. This is quantified by measuring the effect that a marginal increase in the proportion of foreign workers—foreign residents or cross-border workers—would have on selected quantiles and measures of inequality. Analysis of the 2006 Structure of Earnings Survey reveals that foreign workers have generally lower wages than natives and therefore tend to haul the overall wage distribution downwards. Yet, their influence on wage inequality reveals small and negative. All impacts are further muted when accounting for human capital and, especially, job characteristics. Not observing any large positive inequality contribution on the Luxembourg labour market is a striking result given the sheer size of the foreign workforce and its polarization at both ends of the skill distribution.

This paper presents a framework for studying international differences in the distribution of household income. Integrating micro-econometric and micro-simulation approaches in a decomposition analysis, it quantifies the role of tax-benefit systems, employment and occupational structures, labour and financial market returns, and demographic composition in accounting for differences in income inequality across countries. Building upon EUROMOD (the European tax-benefit calculator) and its harmonised datasets, the model is portable and can be implemented for cross-country comparisons between any participating country. An application to the UK and Ireland—two countries that have much in common while displaying different levels of inequality—shows that differences in tax-benefit rules between the two countries account for over one third of the observed difference in disposable household income inequality. Demographic differences play negligible roles. The Irish tax-benefit system is more redistributive than UK’s due to a higher tax progressivity and higher average transfer rates. These are largely attributable to policy parameter differences, but also to differences in pre-tax, pre-transfer income distributions.

Assessments of whose income growth is the greatest and whose is the smallest are typically based on comparisons of income changes for income groups (e.g. rich versus poor) or income values (e.g. quantiles). However, income group and quantile composition changes over time because of income mobility. To summarize patterns of income growth while also tracking the fortunes of the same individuals, a longitudinal perspective is required. For this case, we develop dominance conditions and summary indices for comparisons of distributions of individual income growth, together with associated methods of estimation and inference. Using these methods and data from the British Household Panel Survey, we study individual income growth for periods between 1991 and 2005. We show that income growth was significantly more pro-poor in the early years of the Labour government than in earlier Conservative years.

This chapter examines the joint distribution of wealth and income in Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Sweden, and the United States. Both the level household net worth and its main components are examined at the top and middle of the distribution as well as by income group. The chapter next examines the unconditional joint distribution of disposable income and net worth, which is found to be roughly similar across the countries. Descriptive bivariate regressions, using household composition, as well as the age and education level of the reference persons are estimated to gauge the extent to which the covariation of wealth and income is driven by observable characteristics as opposed to unobserved covariation.