We show that differences in childhood environments play an important role in shaping gender gaps in adulthood by documenting three facts using population tax records for children born in the 1980s.
CPI Research
The well-known exceptionalism of American relative poverty extends only to rich countries, not to middle-income countries. Using a relative poverty standard for disposable household income, the U.S.
Segregation often overlaps with many other place-based inequalities—poverty, unemployment, crime, and housing quality and overcrowding. These overlapping disadvantages are seemingly much more common in the U.S.
The U.S. population is not just sicker, on average, than the European population, but also has a higher level of health inequality than the European population. The U.S.
When compared to 24 middle-income and high-income countries, the U.S. ranks 16th in the amount of intergenerational earnings mobility. The relatively low level of mobility in the U.S. may arise in part because low-income children in the U.S.
The income achievement gap in the United States is quite large relative to the 19 OECD countries examined here. Countries with higher levels of poverty, inequality, and economic segregation (among schools) tend to have larger income achievement gaps.
Over the past four decades, only the very rich, the top 0.1 percent, have realized wealth increases in the U.S. In 2012, the top 0.1 percent included 160,000 households with total net assets of more than 20 million.
When disposable-income inequality is measured across 20–35 years of survey data, the consistent result is that the U.S. has the highest level of disposable-income inequality among rich countries.
The U.S. safety net provides about half of the income support needed to increase all incomes to the level needed to meet basic needs. Levels of poverty relief are typically higher—and sometimes much higher— in other post-industrial countries.