The public's perceived sense of safety influences many domains in significant ways: It impacts individual behavior, life quality, consumption behavior, and even political views as well as government action. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the German Federal Government's 2024...

Financial student aid improves educational outcomes and reduces social inequality, yet many eligible students do not take it up. To examine whether correcting misperceptions increases take-up, I conducted an RCT with 6,225 university students across Germany who were not receiving aid. I find...

In this article, we examine structural changes in minimum wage and low wage labor following the introduction and first increase of the German minimum wage. Changes in the impact that workers face earning gross hourly wages below the minimum-wage or low-wage thresholds are identified by comparing...

The public's perceived sense of safety influences many domains in significant ways: It impacts individual behavior, life quality, consumption behavior, and even political views as well as government action. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the German Federal Government's 2024...

Das Sicherheitsgefühl der Bevölkerung ist gesellschaftlich hoch relevant: Es beeinflusst individuelles Verhalten, Lebensqualität, Konsumverhalten und kann politische Einstellungen sowie staatliches Handeln prägen. Mithilfe von Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) und des...

Past trauma resulting from personal life shocks, especially during periods of particular volatility such as regime transition (or regime change), can give rise to significant long-lasting effects on people's health and well-being. We study this question by drawing on longitudinal and...

Power law distributions are ubiquitous in socioeconomic contexts. While their general properties are well understood, it is often less clear why they regularly appear in empirical data. What are the generative mechanisms leading to power laws, how do they arise in the real world? This paper aims...

This paper analyses the relationship between financial inclusion and the economic and social development in Mexico. For this quantitative research, a study sample composed by 448 observations during the 2007-2020 was analyzed using fixed effect estimations with instrumental variables 2SLS....

We provide annual estimates of inequality in monthly per capita household earnings in India over the period 2017/18 to 2022/23 based on analysis of India's Periodic Labour Force Surveys. Over the six years, the estimate of inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient is in the range of 0.40 to...

Sudden and unforeseen events, notably the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored and exacerbated pre-existing urban inequalities. These disruptions have disproportionately affected the most vulnerable sectors of society, thereby further aggravating existing inequalities. Addressing these inequality...

Climate change and economic inequality are two critical and interlinked global challenges. The feasibility of jointly reducing greenhouse gas emissions and inequality has often been questioned. Here, we aim to test whether a properly designed mix of progressive and environmental fiscal policies...

Global income inequality captures income differences among all individuals around the world. Global inequality around the world increased from 1820 to 1990 as incomes in richer countries grew faster than incomes in relatively poorer countries. However, these trends were reversed over the three...

This study offers the first analysis of environmental and climate inequalities at the census tract level in Italy, providing valuable insights into spatial patterns of environmental and social vulnerability. The results highlight significant environmental inequality related to exposure to air...

Alfani and Carballo (2023) estimate the levels of income inequality in the Aztec Empire around 1492, that is, before the Spanish conquest. Their main estimate finds that the Gini index was 50.4. They conclude that income inequality in the Aztec Empire was high even before the Spanish conquest,...

This paper assumes two kinds of social planners who evaluate income distributions concerning social welfare, economic inequality and poverty. The first kind of social planner, SPε , comprises averters to income inequality as measured by the normative parameter ε. The second kind of social...

When the state does not reach with the same effectiveness everybody and everywhere, it creates pockets of exclusions and hampers the opportunities of individuals belonging to the excluded groups to participate fully economically, socially, and politically. This paper develops an index to measure...

Digital skills are increasingly essential for full participation in modern life. Yet many low-income families face a dual digital divide: limited access to technology and limited ability to use it effectively. These gaps can undermine adults' ability to support their children's education,...

This article investigates the political cost of poverty in democracies marked by deep social divisions. We develop a probabilistic voting model that incorporates clientelism as a strategic tool employed by elite political parties to secure electoral support from non-elite voters. Unlike models...

Market forces beyond individual control are a central driver of income inequality, a phenomenon we refer to as market luck. In meritocratic societies, this raises the question of whether individuals perceive such inequalities as fair. To address this question, we conduct experiments in the US,...

Today's parents prioritize their children's future opportunities and well-being over the costs and benefits of child-rearing. Inequality of opportunity (IO) worsens children's developmental prospects and reduces fertility intentions. Using nationally representative data from China, we show that...

This study examines how overconfidence shapes individuals' preference for redistribution. We contend that overconfidence inflates individuals' income expectations, which reduces the perceived benefits of redistribution for these individuals and thereby weakens their preference for such policies....