"Shared prosperity" has become a common phrase in the development policy discourse. This short paper provides its most widely used operational definition – the growth rate in the average income of the poorest 40 percent of a country's population – and describes its origins. The paper...

We study how international migration changes the private transfers made between households in the migrant sending communities of developing countries. A priori, it is indeterminate whether migration and remittances strengthen or weaken the degree of private transfers in these communities. From a...

This paper analyzes the impact of a recent recommendation made by Quebec's Comité consultatif de lutte contre la pauvreté et l'exclusion sociale to guarantee every individual an income equal to 80% of Statistics Canada's Market Basket Measure (MBM). Workers with earnings at least equivalent to...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

One reason to be concerned about income inequality is the idea that people not only care about their own absolute income, but also their income relative to various reference groups (e.g. co-workers, friends, neighbors, relatives, etc.). We use Canadian linked employer-employee data to estimate...

Is horizontal equity (HE) the quot;most widely accepted principle of equityquot;? Or does it stand in quot;opposition to the advancement of human welfarequot;? This paper argues that the case for the HE principle is not as straightforward as is usually thought and that it requires advanced...

We discuss and compare five measures of individual well-being, namely income, an objective composite well-being index, a measure of subjective well-being, equivalent income, and a well-being measure based on the von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities of the individuals. After examining the...

Since Aristotle, a vast literature has suggested that economic inequality has important political consequences. Higher inequality is thought to increase demand for government income redistribution in democracies and to discourage democratization and promote class conflict and revolution in...

'Stock estimates' of missing women suggest that the problem is concentrated in South and East Asia and among young children. In contrast, 'flow estimates' suggest that gender bias in mortality is much larger, is as severe among adults as it is among children in India and China, and is larger in...

We design an experiment to examine whether egalitarian preferences, and in particular, behindness aversion as well as preference for favorable inequality affect competitive choices differently among males and females. We find that selection into competitive environments is: (a) negatively...