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...

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...

Using a combination of individual-level, bioclimatic, ethnographic, and archaeological data, we investigate the ancient origins of cross-country variation in preferences for redistribution. Our hypothesis is that contemporary attitudes toward redistribution are shaped by ancestral inequality,...

Using a combination of individual-level, bioclimatic, ethnographic, and archaeological data, we investigate the ancient origins of cross-country variation in preferences for redistribution. Our hypothesis is that contemporary attitudes toward redistribution are shaped by ancestral inequality,...

The Philippines aspires to become a predominantly middle-class society by 2040. Significant strides have been achieved in the reduction of extreme poverty. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of recent gains and the vulnerability of many households to economic shocks. This study...

This paper provides a methodological contribution to the study of historical income inequality by examining the construction and use of social tables for the nineteenth century. In a period when modern household surveys were absent, social tables represent one of the only feasible approaches for...

Why did enduring socio-economic inequality emerge between the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE, after millennia of substantial egalitarianism? We test the hypothesis of inequality being a by-product of state formation in an archeological panel covering Southern Iraq between 3900 and 1900 BCE. We...

We show that high-income buyers earn higher capital gains on housing using detailed transaction data from Denmark. Geographic location statistically accounts for nearly all the difference, with little role for aggregate market timing, property type, or other buyer characteristics. This finding...

This paper provides a methodological contribution to the study of historical income inequality by examining the construction and use of social tables for the nineteenth century. In a period when modern household surveys were absent, social tables represent one of the only feasible approaches for...

Subnational data on household welfare help identify and monitor locations with high concentration of poverty and inequality, resulting in more efficient policy interventions. Yet, very few global databases on poverty and inequality exist at the subnational level. Using the World Bank's Global...

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...