Using representative survey data collected in 2018, I study how laypersons in Germany perceive the effects of quantitative easing (QE) on their personal financial situation and on national economic inequality. Almost 40% think that their economic situation is unaffected by QE, whereas 20% and 6%...

The economic impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is studied using a (semi) endogenous growth model with two novel features. First, the task approach from labor economics is reformulated and integrated into a growth model. Second, the standard representative household assumption is rejected,...

The Gini index, a widely used economic inequality measure, is computed using data whose designs involve clustering and stratification, generally known as complex household surveys. Under complex household survey, we develop two novel procedures for estimating Gini index with a pre-specified...

There are two main sources of data on income distribution. Household based surveys report mainly on inequality in equivalised household level disposable income. Top income shares, on the other hand, focus on the tax unit as the unit of analysis, because administrative records are obtained from...

Despite South Africa's need for inclusive economic growth, we find that the income trajectories of the rich continue to diverge from the rest of the income distribution. We combine household survey data and tax data (which, unlike household survey data, includes accurate data for the very rich)...

Given the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, the State has had to respond rapidly and quite severely to flatten the curve and slow the spread of the virus. This has had significant implications for many aspects of life with differential impacts across the population. The lack of timely...

The corporate sector has turned from a net borrowing position to a net lending position in many advanced countries over the past decades. This phenomenon is rather unusual as the corporate sector had historically borrowed funds from other sectors in the economy. In this paper, we analyze how...

This paper constitutes an initial attempt to shed light on the role of income distribution in household debt and financial market access in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). Using household-level data from the OeNB's Euro Survey for the period 2009-2018, we address the question...

This paper examines the distributional implications of inflation on top income shares in 12 advanced economies using data over the period 1920-2016. We use Local Projections to analyze how top income shares respond to an inflation shock, and panel regressions in which all variables are defined...

Unlike physical capital, human capital has both embodied and disembodied dimensions. It can be perceived of as skill and acquired knowledge, but also as knowledge spillover effects between overlapping generations and across different skill groups within and across countries. We illustrate the...

Based on a recently constructed 2017 Social Accounting Matrix, we examine structural aspects of the Myanmar economy. The exposition ranges from industry, trade, household income, and expenditure to labour market issues. Agriculture remains dominant, accounting for about 50 per cent of employment...

In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of which mechanisms underlie contrasting observed trends in income inequality around the globe. To address this...

This paper documents the compilation of a 2017 Social Accounting Matrix for Myanmar. This is based on partial and unpublished National Accounts data and unpublished Supply and Use Table data, as well as Balance of Payment data and Government Finance Statistics data. It provides a detailed...

During the last decades, the United States experienced an increase in the number of natural disasters as well as their destructive capability. Several studies suggest a damaging effect of natural disasters on income. In this paper, I estimate the effects of natural disasters on the entire income...

Transferring public benefits to people in no need of them appears to be a waste of public money. Thus, there seems to be support for a move away from universal child benefits and towards means testing. This study presents a critique of this overly-simplistic view and proposes a very simple...

We propose a theory-based adjustment to the labor income share to correct for the self-employment bias. Through a two-sector neoclassical framework with agriculture and non-agriculture, we derive the productivity-adjusted aggregate labor income share in terms of the agricultural productivity...

We complement the institutional literature on gender and the welfare state by examining how taxes and transfers affect the incomes of men and women. Using microsimulation and intra-household income splitting rules, we measure the differences in the level and composition of individual disposable...

This paper aims to quantify the effects from migration on net income distributions, disentangling the roles played by factor reallocation and remittances, and focusing on two (primarily) destination countries (Spain and Italy) and two (primarily) origin countries (Jordan and Iraq). Using LIS-ERF...

We analyse the UK policy response to Covid-19 and its impact on household incomes, as of late April 2020, using microsimulation methods. We estimate that households will lose a substantial share of their net income (8% on average). The proportional losses are largest for higher-income families....

Income distribution is seen as instrumental to human development and to a number of development outcomes through a variety of channels. It is also considered important in itself, as testified by its inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet existing research on income inequality in...

This paper analyses the impacts of indirect tax policy reforms on income distribution and poverty in Tanzania by applying a standard static microsimulation model TAZMOD v1.8. The simulations model two indirect tax reforms involving changes to the excise duty and value-added tax rates on...

This paper establishes some stylized facts of the long run relationship between growth and labor shares using historical data for the United States (1898-2010), the United Kingdom (1856-2010), and France (1896-2010). Performing individual country time-frequency analysis, we demonstrate the...

We describe methods of combining administrative and survey data to improve the measurement of income. We begin by decomposing the total survey error in the mean of survey reports of dollars received from a government transfer program. We decompose this error into three parts, generalized...

We investigate whether Chinese household incomes have caught up to those of the middle class in the developed world. Using nationwide survey data for 2002 and 2013, we find considerable catch up. Defining the global middle class as being neither poor nor rich in the developed world, we estimate...

This paper contributes to the literature on secular stagnation by estimating a measure of potential output growth for the post-war US economy derived from a novel model specification that allows for the cyclical interactions between income distribution, represented by the trajectory of the labor...

Lupu and Pontusson (2011) argue that the structure of income inequality, rather than its level, can explain differences in fiscal redistribution across modern welfare states. Contrary to the assertion that there is robust evidence in support of this proposition, the present paper challenges the...

Does the federal minimum wage in Germany introduced in 2015 improve the income situation of low income households and reduce in-work poverty? Previous literature on its distributional impact was either focused on earnings and hourly wages (e.g. Caliendo et al., 2017), or is based on ex-ante...

We examine whether economic downturns reshape the distribution of population income giving rise to a "middle-class squeeze." We test this hypothesis using alternative definitions of middle-class, such as income-based measures from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and perceived measures from...

While skilled immigration ceteris paribus provides an immediate boost to GDP per capita by adding to the human capital stock of the receiving economy, might it also reduce the number of 'good jobs', i.e. those with training, available to indigenous workers? We analyse this issue theoretically...

There are two fundamental reasons why factor shares have traditionally been overlooked in the economic literature. First, because of their nature, factor shares are conceptually difficult to define and measure. Second, they have for a long time been perceived as constant across time and space....

Mainstream monitoring of income dynamics and inequality is based on summary measures that can miss important phenomena prevalent in income distributions. Relying on quantile functions and the adapted statistical framework suggested by Székely and Rizzo (2004), we characterize the change and...

We study the effects of innovations on income distribution in capitalist economies characterised by a drive to accumulate. Consistent with the basic intuitions of Marx's theory of technical change, we show that there is no obvious relation between ex-ante profitable innovations and the income...

The corporate sector has turned from a net borrowing position to a net lending position in many advanced countries over the past decades. This phenomenon is rather unusual as the corporate sector had historically borrowed funds from other sectors in the economy. In this paper, we analyze how...

A real-effort experiment is conducted in order to detect preferences for one out of three different models of the Welfare State characterized by different tax-and-transfer schemes. We reproduce a small society in the lab where: Subjects are grouped in three stylized classes (the rich, the middle...

This paper studies the effects of labour market reforms on the functional distribution of income in a DSGE model (Roeger et al., 2008) with skill differentiation, in which households supply three types of labour: low-, medium- and high-skilled. The households receive income from labour, tangible...