East Asia and Latin America have diverged in several dimensions in the past three decades. This paper compares household saving behavior in two countries in each region (Mexico, Peru, Thailand and Taiwan). We make four contributions. First, we provide the first comparisons of savings in these...

The use of income distribution indicators in the economics literature has increased considerably in recent years. This work relies on household surveys from 18 LAC countries to take a step back from the use of these indicators, and explore what's behind the numbers, and what information they...

This paper argues that there is no country in Latin America where we can confidently say that income inequality improved during the 1990s. We document this fact for the 15 countries where comparable household surveys, covering most of the population, are available. What we observe are genuine...

This paper presents microeconomic simulation techniques to examine what drives differences in inequality across countries. The simulation decomposes cross-country inequality differences into the importance of individual decisions, such as fertility, mating, labor force participation, and...

This paper applies econometric estimation methods to improve the level of precision and detail in the measurement of welfare in Mexico, and specifically to estimate household incomes. As is the case in other countries, Mexico has had, on the one hand, household surveys that provide high...

The use of income distribution indicators in the economics literature has increased considerably in recent years. Using household surveys from 18 Latin American and Caribbean countries, this article seeks to explore what is behind the numbers, and what information they convey. We find that the...