This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2002. The results?based initially on time-series and then on panel time-series data and analysis, and robust for different estimators and financial...

We conduct an empirical study on how 22 donors allocate their bilateral aid among 147 recipient countries over the 1970-2004 period to investigate whether recent changes in the international aid architecture-at the international and country level-have led to changes in donor behavior. We find...

Nonfarm activities generate on average about 60 percent of rural households? incomes in the eastern Himalayan region of India. This paper analyzes the determinants of participation in nonfarm activities and of nonfarm incomes across rural households. We present and explore an analytical...

I examine how the effects of fiscal policy and forward guidance are shaped by preferences over wealth calibrated based on microeconomic evidence on household saving behavior and individual discount rates. The contractionary effect of a permanent cut in government expenditure implemented during a...

This paper utilizes a unique micro data set on consumer durables to study the effect of consumption tax reforms on the time path of consumption. The dataset reports the monthly sales of individual products and their consumer prices in 22 European countries, which enacted numerous consumption tax...

We construct a narrative dataset of net-revenue shocks for Germany by extending the tax shock series of Hayo and Uhl (2014) and coding a shock series for social security. We estimate the multiplier effects of shocks to taxes, social security contributions and benefits in a proxy SVAR framework...

In 2009 the Australian government delivered $8 billion in direct payments to households. These payments were pre-announced and randomly allocated over a 5-week period. We exploit this random allocation to estimate the causal response of households consumption expenditures. While we don't find a...