Income inequality has risen dramatically in the United States, with potentially negative social, economic, and political consequences. Governments can use redistributive tax policies to combat inequality, but doing so requires public support. When will voters support redistributive tax policies?...

Understanding the origins of wealth inequality is critical in the debate over what, if anything, to do about it. In this note, we propose a simple model which is still rich enough to reproduce observed patterns of wealth inequality. We call it the Concentrated Asset Betting (CAB) model. A key...

This paper investigates how income inequality affects the quality of imported products. In a heterogeneous-firms trade model, I show that higher inequality increases total expenditure leading to a reduction in unit value and quality of imported goods. To test this prediction, I employ detailed...

Previous research has documented a strong correlation between countries’ income levels and the quality of their export goods. Given the evidence of fast unconditional convergence in export quality, this raises the question how to reconcile these stylized facts with a stable world income...

This paper shows that the distribution of observed consumption is not a good proxy for the distribution of heterogeneous consumers when the current tariff is an increasing block tariff. We use a two-step method to recover the "true" distribution of consumers. First, we estimate the demand...

Consumers have benefited from decades of technological improvement in electronics, yet the distribution of their welfare gains are unexamined, despite interest in other measures of inequality. In this paper, I examine the welfare gains to different income cohorts from the development of multiple...

Economic theory that underlies many empirical microeconomic applications predicts that treatment responses depend on individuals' characteristics and location on the outcome distribution. Using data from a large-scale Pakistani school report card experiment, we consider tests for treatment...

For centuries it has been believed that the extension of the franchise in unequal societies would lead to relatively high levels of redistribution. According to international rankings, however, among the fourteen most unequal countries in the world, nine have been democratic for at least the...

A formula is derived for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that takes account of intragenerational income inequality and its evolution with economic growth. The social discount rate (SDR) should be adjusted to account for intragenerational and intergenerational inequality aversion and for risk...