A Cross-National Comparison of Permanent Inequality in the United States and Germany
利用纵向数据测量1980年代美国和德国的收入不平等，发现美国不仅单期不平等程度更高，而且其中永久性不平等的占比也大于德国，挑战了关于社会福利和劳动力市场影响的传统预期。
Traditional cross-sectional measures find greater inequality in the United States than in industrialized Western European countries, but are unable to distinguish transitory from permanent inequality. With longitudinal data, we measure cross-sectional inequality during the 1980s using the Shorrocks measure of income stability to find the degree to which single-period measures exaggerate permanent inequality. Surprisingly, given the smaller social welfare system and the less restrictive labor markets in the United States, we find that both single-period inequality and the share of that inequality that persists over time are greater in the United States than in Germany. © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology