This study examines the relationship between the onset and progression of a chronic disease and subsequent income and employment trajectories using SHARE-RV, a longitudinal dataset that links survey data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with German Pension...

Financial student aid improves educational outcomes and reduces social inequality, yet many eligible students do not take it up. To examine whether correcting misperceptions increases take-up, I conducted an RCT with 6,225 university students across Germany who were not receiving aid. I find...

The public's perceived sense of safety influences many domains in significant ways: It impacts individual behavior, life quality, consumption behavior, and even political views as well as government action. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the German Federal Government's 2024...

South Africa's education system remains shaped by a legacy of colonialism and apartheid, with persistent racial disparities in attainment despite multiple post-1994 reforms. Using wave 5 of the National Income Dynamics Study, this paper examines intergenerational education mobility across...

Background: Socio-economic inequality and vaccination inequity have long been critical issues. However, no studies have explored the gap in influenza vaccination uptake between public and private schools. Importantly, the extent to which socio-economic inequality translates into vaccination...

This paper describes a new public-access online database containing internationally comparable estimates of inequality of opportunity for seventy-two countries, covering two-thirds of the world's population. The estimates were computed directly from the unit-record microdata for 196 household...

Abstract We study life expectancy inequality in a Mirrleesian life-cycle framework. Life expectancy shapes the efficiency dimension of redistribution via the pension wedge. Moreover, cost- and preference-based channels arising from the income-lifespan gradient reduce the mechanical value of...

Is income inequality in the United States primarily driven by disparities between ethnic groups or within them? The evidence reveals a striking pattern: 96% of U.S. income inequality arises from variation within groups sharing common ancestral origins, far overshadowing the comparatively small...

We characterize optimal climate policy in an economy with heterogeneous households and non-homothetic preferences. We focus on constrained efficiency, where the planner is restricted from transferring resources across households. We derive three results. First, the constrained-optimal carbon tax...

Market forces, and notably the role of trade openness, contribute to shaping inequality in South Africa and may limit the inclusiveness of its growth path. Recently, policy reforms may have helped to mitigate these effects. To better understand these developments, we analyse trends in post-tax...

This paper is the first to examine how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) influence the support for income redistribution in adulthood. Using data from the 2022-2024 wave of the Global Flourishing Study on over 160,000 individuals from 22 countries, we construct measures of ACEs based on...

Distribution sensitive welfare and poverty measures are designed to respond to low values of individual income or consumption. However, very small positive values can have an extreme influence on many distribution sensitive measures, and some measures are not defined for nonpositive values....

While Viet Nam has been remarkably successful in poverty reduction, the country is faced with various challenges ranging from uneven pockets of poverty, regional inequality, low labour productivity, and high informality rates, to a fast-ageing society. We offer an updated overview of the social...

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of this century. This is more so for developing and least-developed countries, which have limited means of adaptation and a high proportion of vulnerable populations. We empirically study the interconnection between climate and...

This paper examines the impact of temperature shocks on individual earnings and income inequality in South Africa. We leverage high-resolution satellite temperature data, merged with administrative tax records from the South African National Treasury and UNU-WIDER. Data from 2009 to 2022 shows...

This chapter builds on Robert Blecker's pathbreaking, decades-long contributions (Blecker 1989, 1998, 2013; Blecker and Razmi, 2008) which incorporate, among many other contributions, capital flows to the balance of payments constrained growth literature. We link this to the literature on wealth...

Market forces, and notably the role of trade openness, contribute to shaping inequality in South Africa and may limit the inclusiveness of its growth path. Recently, policy reforms may have helped to mitigate these effects. To better understand these developments, we analyze trends in post-tax...

This paper is the first to examine how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) influence the support for income redistribution in adulthood. Using data from the 2022-2024 wave of the Global Flourishing Study on over 160,000 individuals from 22 countries, we construct measures of ACEs based on...

While Vietnam has been remarkably successful in poverty reduction, the country is faced with various challenges ranging from uneven pockets of poverty, regional inequality, low labour productivity, and high informality rates, to a fast-ageing society. We offer an updated overview of the social...

To promote social justice and support inclusive development in East Africa, addressing land inequality is essential. Kenya and Uganda illustrate the complex factors driving land inequality in sub Saharan Africa. During colonial times, extensive fertile lands were often alienated from local...

We study beliefs about wealth inequality and preferences for wealth redistribution, drawing on a large-scale online survey in Germany. Specifically, we assess participants' knowledge of the German wealth distribution, their perceived position within it, and the effects of two information...