This paper simulates the distributional impact of the Russian personal income tax (PIT) following the flat tax reform of 2001 using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. I decompose the change in the distribution of net income into a direct (tax) effect and an indirect effect....

A strong association between incomes across generations - with children from poor families likely to be poor as adults - is frequently considered an indicator of insufficient equality of opportunity. Studies of such "intergenerational persistence," or lack of intergenerational mobility, are...

Finance is a vital ingredient for economic growth, but there can also be too much of it. This study investigates what fifty years of data for OECD countries have to say about the role of the financial sector for economic growth and income inequality and draws policy implications. Over the past...

Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century posits the return r on capital to be larger than the economic growth rate g as a main driver of inequalities. This article points out the circumstances under which the reverse inference holds. We show that increasing inequality promotes increasing...

Standard income inequality figures, based on official household survey statistics covering most of the population, report a steady rise of inequality across a majority of advanced countries. The usefulness of these data sources in providing a timely and internationally comparable picture of...

Top earners have become the subject of intense public and scholarly debate. This is the first paper that comprehensively documents the profiles of the 1% highest paid employees across 18 European countries. The data come from the largest harmonised source available, an employer-based survey that...

This paper analyses two-way interactions between monetary policy and inequality in selected advanced economies. In the context of a highly accommodative monetary stance over recent years, the analysis focuses on the effects of monetary policy on inequality over the business cycle via its impacts...

The Chilean economy has had an extraordinary performance over the last decades with strong growth and declining poverty rates. However, the economy is now slowing at a time when inequality remains very high, making future social progress challenging. This paper discusses how to achieve greater...

This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and economy-wide disposable income inequality. Drawing on a dataset of up to 20 OECD countries over a period from 1996 to 2011, a regression analysis is performed, relating several indicators of national income inequality...

This paper examines the relationship between financial sector transformation and income inequality. We construct an econometric model of income concentration for a panel of 16 OECD countries in the years 1995-2009. From our study, financial sector transformation, measured individually by three...