A fundamental question in social sciences relates to the effect of wealth inequality on economic growth. Yet, in tackling the question, researchers have had to use income as a proxy for wealth. We derive a global measure of wealth inequality from Forbes magazine's listing of billionaires and...

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. We construct two new metadata...

We examine the socially optimal wealth distribution in a two-person two-good model with heterogeneous workers and asymmetric social interactions where only one (social) individual derives positive or negative utility from the leisure of the other (non-social) individual. We show that the...

Non-intersection of appropriately-defined Generalized Lorenz (GL) curves is equivalent to a unanimous ranking of distributions of ordinal data by all Cowell and Flachaire (Economica 2017) indices of inequality and by a new index based on GL curve areas. Comparisons of life satisfaction...

Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify individuals, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. We use this...

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint...

This paper reviews the long run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as: What do we know, and how do we know, about the distribution of income and wealth over time? Are...

The vast literature on earnings inequality has so far largely ignored the role played by hours of work. This paper argues that in order to understand earnings dispersion we need to consider not only the dispersion of hourly wages but also inequality in hours worked as well as the correlation...

This paper considers a parametric model for the joint distribution of income and wealth. The model is used to analyze income and wealth inequality in five OECD countries using comparable household-level survey data. We focus on the dependence parameter between the two variables and study whether...

We use the 2002 through 2014 Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys to construct comparable measures of household income and estimates of income inequality over this high-growth period. We focus on two questions: How have benefits from growth been distributed; and do changes in the structure...