Not everybody is benefiting equally from rising mean incomes. We discuss the mean-income population share (MPS), defined as the population share earning less than the mean income, as an indicator of how representative the mean income is for the mass of the population. This measure is both...

Similar looking Lorenz Curves can imply very different income density functions and potentially lead to wrong policy implications regarding inequality. This paper derives a relation between a Lorenz Curve and the modality of its underlying income density: Given a parametric Lorenz Curve, it is...

The convergence debate of whether poorer countries are catching up with richer ones has recently focused on the concept of club convergence, hence convergence within groups of countries. Formally detecting club convergence in the distribution of countries' income per capita over time has,...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

The paper provides new evidence from a survey of 2000 individuals in the US and UK related to predictors of Covid-19 transmission. Specifically, it investigates work and personal predictors of transmission experience reported by respondents using regression models to better understand possible...

This paper studies the impact of building land limitations on within-city variation in urban density and its components crowding, residential coverage, and building height. We utilise geographical obstacles like steep inclines or water bodies as exogenous source of building land limitations...

We provide new insights on the city size distribution of countries around the world. Using more than 10,000 cities delineated via geospatial data and a globally consistent city identification scheme, we investigate distributional shapes in all countries. In terms of population, we find that...

Satellite data on nighttime luminosity is an increasingly popular proxy for economic activity in developing countries. However, their use for analyzing inequality and convergence on a global scale is severely limited by top-coding of the NOAA satellite images, which fail to accurately capture...