Montero (2022) explores a discontinuity in a land reform in El Salvador and reports two main findings. First, relative to outside-owned haciendas operated by contract workers, the productivity of worker-owned cooperatives is higher for staple crops and lower for cash-crop. Second, cooperative...

Since 1980, there has been a steady increase in earnings inequality alongside rapid technological growth in the U.S. economy. To what extent does technological change explain the observed increase in earnings dispersion? How does it affect the optimal progressivity of the tax system? To answer...

This paper studies the relationship between income inequality and risk taking. Increased income inequality is likely to enlarge the scope for upward comparisons and, in the presence of reference-dependent preferences, to increase willingness to take risks. Using a globally representative dataset...

We study the transmission of monetary policy in the presence of heterogeneous households and examine the implications when the share of constrained households is a function of monetary policy. We build an analytically tractable heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model (THANK) with an endogenous...

Montero (2022) explores a discontinuity in a land reform in El Salvador and reports two main findings. First, relative to outside-owned haciendas operated by contract workers, the productivity of worker-owned cooperatives is higher for staple crops and lower for cash-crop. Second, cooperative...

This study analyses the dynamic impact of income inequality and unemployment on crime in a panel of 15 African countries during the period 1994-2019 using four models: the panel vector autoregression model, the generalized method of moments model, the fixed-effect model, and machine learning....

This study examines whether income inequality and poverty are determinants of crime rates across 34 provinces in Indonesia. Three indicators of income inequality and four poverty measures are tested to examine whether the dimension and degree of unequal welfare distribution are linked to crime...

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) elaborately promote "sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all" (Goal 8: SDGs). Considering that there has not been any cross-country comparison of the role of...

This paper investigates the relationship between democracy and antitrust policy. Strong antitrust policies advance the economic and political interests of most citizens, making their adoption more likely in institutional settings that weigh the interests of consumers. We examine the empirical...

This study investigates the relationship between conspicuous consumption and inequality in the United States by doing text mining in Google searches for luxury and comfort goods. The findings reveal a strong correlation between the pursuit of luxury items and levels of income inequality in...

A monetary general equilibrium framework is presented to investigate consequences of a monetary expansion in development contexts. The focus is on the process of inter-sector labor shift in conjunction with the effects on income and wealth distribution, where sectors are defined through a...

Given the complexity of interaction between inflation and inequality, we examine whether the impact of inflation on inequality differs among distinct levels of income inequality across the US states. Results reveal that there is a negative contemporaneous effect of inflation on the inequality...

In this article, it is analyzed which variables limit the reduction of inequality in South America, as measured by the skill premium, in the period of economic stagnation 2016-2019. It considers the variables that explain the decline in inequality in the region in 2002-2015 and applies a...

The vast literature on earnings inequality has so far largely ignored the role played by hours of work. This paper argues that in order to understand earnings dispersion we need to consider not only the dispersion of hourly wages but also inequality in hours worked as well as the correlation...

We suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess relative inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes, such as (continuous) earnings or (discrete and ordinal) education levels, and captures dynastic improvements of such outcomes at different points of the initial...

This paper investigates inequality and intragenerational economic mobility in a developing country with large inequality. Understanding economic mobility is important because it shapes our perception of inequality. Despite its significance, evidence on intragenerational mobility, especially that...

This paper examines the impact of globalization on inequality levels using data from the World Income Inequality Database (WIID) and the Penn World Table. We find that the effect of trade globalization on inequality is an inverted U-shaped relation, a result that remains robust to endogeneity...

This paper examines the impact of labour market and product market reforms on income inequality for 25 OECD countries, using the local projections approach and updates of the reform indicators put together by Duval et al. (2018) until 2020. Our results suggest that both types of (endogenized)...

Pension systems are of crucial importance for life-cycle savings. Since the early 2000s, a transition to a multi-pillar architecture, adding a funded occupational scheme to existing public plans, has been underway in almost every OECD nation. While many aspects of this transition – its...

This paper studies the role of wage and price rigidities in determining aggregate demand. With incomplete markets, real wages determine consumption. In response to shocks, wages and prices may not respond evenly, affecting how shocks transmit to aggregate demand. Motivated by these observations,...

Why do individuals’ preferences for redistribution often diverge widely from their material self-interest? Using an original online survey experiment spanning eight countries and 12,000 respondents across Latin America, one of the most unequal regions in the world, we find significant evidence...

This short article contributes to the Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice by summarizing the literature on the measurement of democracy. I proceed in two step. In the first part, I describe the classical approach for producing a measure of democracy and sketch an alternative approach. The second...

This paper develops an approach to intergenerational mobility in which the trajectories of parental incomes during childhood and adolescence are the conditioning objects for characterizing dependence across generations. We use functional regression methods to produce an intergenerational...

We propose a multi-country trade model with occupational choice, heterogeneous firms, and unemployment to analyze the effects of welfare-maximizing tariffs on welfare, jobs, and top incomes. Consistent with empirical evidence, the model features an employer size-wage premium, complete tariff...

We examine the allocation of a voluntarily-provided collective good with inequality in endowments or productive capabilities. After group members choose their contributions to a collectivegood, a third-party allocator distributes the resulting value among the group members. With and without...

This paper investigates the drivers of global income growth dispersion (across 45 countries) for the period over 1980-2020. The empirical investigation is based on a structural vector autoregression model, where contributions of global (cross-country) dispersions in inflation, financial depth,...

This paper examines the link between political support for basic income funded by linear income taxation and income inequality by household and gender. We develop a model with an increasingly right-skewed distribution of skill across households and a gender wage gap within households. Household...

The relationship between growth, inequality and poverty remains elusive, despite considerable scholarship. To what extent can governments rely on growth to eradicate poverty without reducing inequality? We derive a closed-form relationship between a minimum income threshold, changes in the Gini...

This study examines if the Gini coefficient, which is a widely used measure of income/wealth inequality in a country/society, could be used as a measure of travel time reliability. To be considered a valid measure of travel time reliability, the Gini coefficient should at least agree with...

Cities as the human habitat of the 21st century will have to face an increasingly amount of climate change related risks. More extreme weather events, hot spells and increasing air pollution already have widespread impacts on people, their health and their well-being. Urban vegetation is one...

This article investigates the relationship between income inequality and firms' location and product choices. Using detailed information on income at a regionally disaggregated level and individual data on Austrian restaurants, we demonstrate that firm conduct crucially depends on the...

Since the 1980s, most of the advanced economies have massively ‘flexibilized’ their labour markets by reducing protection against layoffs or introducing temporary and flexible contractual forms. Meanwhile, a stylized fact of economic theory has come undone, namely the stability of the wage...

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...

Climate change is already impacting several development outcomes, including economic growth, human health and mortality, agricultural productivity and even conflict. Moreover, the impact of climate change is expected to be unevenly distributed across locations and population groups. In...

We hypothesize that the role of education in driving wage inequality is not the same across three racial groups in the United States. Using the Current Population Survey (CPS) data for the period 2000-2021, we show that education weighs at most 33% in explaining the wage inequality. Further, we...

Envy is a universal painful emotion, whose economic effects are highly significant, although often neglected. Several anthropological studies have shown how it can create a significant barrier to the evolution of many poor populations, as it causes the formation of a set of institutions that...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on poverty, underemployment and inequality in Cameroon. Our methodology is based on documentary research and descriptive analysis using data from the World Bank, the Ministry of Public Health, and the household survey conducted over the...

Attention to the issue of inequalities in education has risen considerably after the COVID-19 pandemic. Research points to school dropout rates and learning losses that have risen disproportionately among weak socio-economic groups. While patterns are similar in most countries, the rise in...