This paper revisits four recent cross-country empirical studies on the effects of inequality on growth. All four studies report strongly significant negative effects, using the popular system generalized method of moments estimator that is frequently used in cross-country growth empirics. This...

This paper proposes a methodology to approximate individual income distribution dynamics using only time series data on aggregate moments of the income distribution. Under the assumption that individual incomes follow a lognormal autoregressive process, this paper shows that the evolution over...

This paper revisits four recent cross-country empirical studies on the effects of inequality on growth. All four studies report strongly significant negative effects, using the popular system generalized method of moments estimator that is frequently used in cross-country growth empirics. This...

Social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels can be used to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, most of the...

This paper proposes a methodology to approximate individual income distribution dynamics using only time series data on aggregate moments of the income distribution. Under the assumption that individual incomes follow a lognormal autoregressive process, this paper shows that the evolution over...

Incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes. This is because, in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades, changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes...

We use social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, we find that most of...