New Series

Volume 18, Number 2 (June 2009)

The Journal of Income Distribution, Volume 18, Number 2 (June 2009) is now out.

The articles included in this issue do not yield to an overarching summation of the topics they address. Instead, much variety has been provided here, through discussion of the different theoretical tools of the investigations (from certain tenets of game theory to the range of distributions from Pareto to Singh-Madala) and the outcomes of the use of different empirical models for disparities between different workers and savers over a range of times, regions, sectors, and age groups.

This volume is dedicated thus to a range of studies of income distribution in relation to several themes. The first article, by Matthew T. Gregg, presenting a historical instance of a particular type of income distribution, the Cherokee gadugi, tackles its cultural interpretation from an economic theoretic perspective. Concerns over the policy implications of studies used for aspects of quantative poverty determination prompted the second and third articles, by Bolarin T. Omonona and Foluso Y. Okunmadewa, focused on Nigeria, and by Luis Beccaria and Roxana Maurizio, on Argentina between 1991 and 2003. An investigation of the impact of income comparison on job satisfaction by Christopher Wunder and Johannes Schwarze reflects on the effects of envy, information, prestige, and regret for full-time employees in Germany. The three subsequent articles, without noting a geographical focus in their titles, are all similar in highlighting aspects of income distribution with specifics pertinent to different regions of the world: the use of the 'hypothetical worker' as a tool for determining pensions contributions - in countries with national pension plans - by Wade D. Pfau, intergenerational inequality transmission - by parents in Israel - by Michael Beenstock, and the impact of risk on savings decisions made by the poor - in the Individual Development Account program of the United States - by Edmund Khashadourian. Widening emphasis on the estimation of poverty and inequality from grouped data, whether household studies or similar surveys, as in the cases of such for Brazil, China, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Vietnam, is analysed by Camelia Minoiu and Sanjay G. Reddy for the estimation of Lorenz curves from such data, highlighting a specific area of concern, the grouped data methods used by POVCAL and SimSIP. The links between theoretical forms of income distributions and the behavior of their entropy are studied by G.R. Mohtashami Borzadaran and Zahra Behadani in a final Note.