We present estimates of the relationship between the share of income accruing to the middle class and GDP per capita of ASEAN economies. The increase in GDP per capita that ASEAN economies experienced during 1970-2010 significantly contributed to a higher share of income accruing to the middle...

This paper extends Piketty's analysis of the wealth-income ratio used as a proxy for wealth inequality, to allow for innovation. Drawing on a Schumpeterian (R&D-based) growth model that incorporates both tangible and intangible capital and using historical data for 21 OECD countries, we find the...

This paper examines the contributions of foreign growth (particularly in China), on Japan's domestic economic performance and inequality. While the standard approach to external sources of inequality has emphasized transmission through trade and labor markets, here the emphasis is on financial...

Recent research has highlighted a negative impact of inequality on economic growth. We re-evaluate this hypothesis focusing on both inequality and poverty and their interaction. We replicate previous results showing that inequality has a negative impact on growth. However, we show that when we...

Technical change in key OECD countries since 1990 is examined in terms of its contributions to total factor productivity and to factor bias. The dependence of real income and inequality on changes in factor abundance, total factor productivity, factor bias, the relative cost of capital goods and...

In transitional economies like China, comparatively low real wages imply sub-OECD labor and skill shares of value added and comparatively high capital shares. Despite rapid real wage growth, however, rather than converge toward the OECD, China's low-skill labor share has been falling, due to...

We use a newly constructed narrative measure of regulatory bank capital requirement tightening events (Eickmeier et al., 2018) to examine their effects on household income and expenditure inequality in the US. Income and expenditure inequality both decline (the latter decline being slightly less...

Economic theory suggests that monopoly prices hurt consumers but benefit shareholders. But in a world where individuals or households can be both consumers and shareholders, the impact of market power on inequality depends in part on the relative distribution of consumption and corporate equity...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distribution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...

This paper reports estimates of the elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net-of-tax rate for New Zealand taxpayers. The elasticity of taxable income was estimated to be substantially higher for the highest income groups. Generally it was higher for men than for women. Changes in the...