Between 2000 and 2010, the Gini coefficient declined in 13 of 17 Latin American countries. The decline was statistically significant and robust to changes in the time interval, inequality measures and data sources. In depth country studies for Argentina, Brazil and Mexico suggest two main...

Conventional wisdom predicts that changes in macroeconomic conditions significantly affect income inequality. In this paper we hypothesize that the way in which macroeconomic conditions affect inequality depends on how these conditions influence the constituents of total inequality: inequality...

We examine the effect of the 2002-2007 civil conflict in Côte d'Ivoire on children's health status using household surveys collected before, during, and after the conflict, and information on the exact location and date of conflict events. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting both...

In the face of past ambiguous results on growth effects of education when measured through school attainment, some papers suggest that some countries may be unable to use productively their schooling output because of the scope of cronyism. We dig deeper and demonstrate that, in a stylized...

In this paper we study intra-generational income mobility in European countries over the years shortly preceding the outburst of the global crisis. Income mobility plays a crucial role in shaping distributive patterns and is closely related to the capacity of a socio-economic system to provide...

Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes three methodological...

This paper quantifies the occupational segregation of Hispanics in the largest Hispanic enclaves of the U.S. Using a procedure based on propensity score, it also explores the role played by the characteristics of Hispanics in explaining the variation of segregation across metropolitan areas. The...

In this paper, following the literature on well-being, we propose an aggregate measure of employment deprivation among households that is increasing in the incidence of household unemployment (how many households are touched by the lack of employment of any of its members), its intensity (how...

We establish the conditions under which a close functional relationship between objective and subjective inequality measures can be derived. These conditions are satisfied by many of the most important models for the distribution of income that have been proposed in the literature. We illustrate...

We introduce and characterize axiomatically a diversity criterion, capturing individual dissimilarity as ‘revealed’ by the different best-choices that members of a society select from a set of opportunities. Diversity ordering is induced by a class of frequency-based evaluation functions,...