This paper carries out a time series analysis of the Gini coefficient for disposable income in a sample that includes both advanced and emerging economies. Our results show that inequality has alternated between stationary and nonstationary regimes during the period 1960-2017 in most countries....

Counterfactual distributions are important ingredients for policy analysis and decomposition analysis in empirical economics. In this article we develop modeling and inference tools for counterfactual distributions based on regression methods. The counterfactual scenarios that we consider...

We provide stylized facts on the evolving shape dynamics of the US personal income distribution from 1962 to 2000. Based on adaptive kernel density estimation, we propose an adaptive bootstrap test for multimodality. Our results indicate that multimodality has been a predominant feature of the...

This paper studies the long-run persistence of inequality in the U.S. With this aim, both income and wealth inequality measures covering the period from 1870 to 2019 have been analyzed. The persistent character of inequality has been assessed using unit root and structural break tests for time...

This paper considers the problem of testing a finite number of moment inequalities. We propose a two-step approach. In the first step, a confidence region for the moments is constructed. In the second step, this set is used to provide information about which moments are "negative." A...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget share distributions — defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities — for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. We...

Because finite sample inference for inequality indices based on asymptotic methods or the standard bootstrap does not perform well, Davidson and Flachaire (Journal of Econometrics, 2007) and Cowell and Flachaire (Journal of Econometrics, 2007) proposed inference based on semiparametric methods...

We describe a simple method to obtain kindred stationary densities of random Markov processes with respect to an Ito transformation function. As applied to income and wealth densities, they are akin to one another because they share the income growth and income volatility shape parameters. The...