We review the recent empirical literature on global poverty, focusing on key methodological aspects. These include the choice of welfare indicator, poverty line and purchasing power parity exchange rates, equivalence scales, data sources, and estimation methods. We also discuss the importance of...

We put together the different conceptual issues involved in measuring inequality of opportunity, discuss how these concepts have been translated into computable measures, and point out the problems and choices researchers face when implementing these measures. Our analysis identities and...

This paper analyzes the relationship between income inequality and inequality of opportunities for income acquisition in nine developed countries during the nineties. We develop a new definition of equality of opportunity and show how it can be implemented empirically. Equality of opportunity is...

This paper analyses the effects of the recent Economic Crisis on individual preferences for redistribution in 23 European countries. After implementing a decomposition of the variation in these preferences, it is showed that the crisis was highly significant in increasing support for...

Are macroeconomic factors such as income inequality the real root causes of financial crises? We explore a variety of financial and macroeconomic variables to find the most reliable predictors for financial crises in 14 developed countries over a period of more than 100 years. Our results, based...

In this paper, we measure the effect of changing capital income shares upon inequality of gross household income. Using EU-SILC data covering 17 EU countries from 2005 to 2011 we find that capital income shares are positively associated with the concentration of gross household income. Moreover,...

In this paper, we survey the literature that studies the issue of growing inequalities in advanced countries (the North). We firstly unveil the main facts concerning widening inequality in the North and we underlie the differences between countries and groups of countries. We put forward the...

Between 2000 and 2009, the Gini coefficient declined in 13 of 17 Latin American countries for which comparable data exist. The decline was statistically significant and robust to changes in the time interval, inequality measures and data sources. In depth country studies for Argentina, Brazil,...