This paper presents a new methodology to measure inequality that optimally combines household survey information and tax records to construct a complete income distribution. Combining the two data sources is necessary because, on the one hand, household surveys do not accurately represent the...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....

The paper defines the Gini index as the sum of individual contributions where individual contributions are interpreted as the degree of diversity of each individual from all other members of society. Among various possible forms of individual contributions to the Gini found in the literature,...

The paper assesses the impact of overall inequality, as well as inequality among the poor and among the rich, on the growth rates along various percentiles of the income distribution. The analysis uses micro-census data from U.S. states covering the period from 1960 to 2010. The paper finds...

The continued poverty impact of the financial crisis in Serbia is difficult to establish beyond 2010 because of the lack of survey data. This paper tackles this difficulty. It uses a micro-simulation approach that accounts for a key pathway of the financial crisis in Serbia, the labor market....

The paper combines state-level fiscal data with household survey data to assess the links between sub-national fiscal policy and income inequality in Brazil over the period 1995-2011. The results indicate that a tighter fiscal stance at the sub-national level is not associated with a...

The paper provides a detailed review of Thomas Piketty's book"Capital in the 21st century."It focuses on the new contributions of the book, and in particular on its unified treatment of economic growth, functional income distribution, and concentration of personal income. It concludes that...

The academic literature on equality of opportunity has burgeoned. The concepts and measures have begun to be used by policy institutions, including in specific sectors such as health and education. It is argued that one advantage of focusing on equality of opportunity is that policy makers are...

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. This study uses two new metadata...

How much do countries spend on social protection? Do social protection programs cover all poor people? And, how well are they targeted? It is notoriously hard to find comprehensive cross-country data on social protection programs which can help answer such questions and allow to benchmark social...