The purpose of this paper is to compare pension schemes with respect to their intergenerational redistributive effects caused by economic and demographic changes. It is shown how these effects depend on the specific design of the pension scheme, with special attention devoted to the indexation...

Interest in the emergence of a global middle class has resulted in a number of attempts to identify and enumerate who belongs to it . Current research provides wildly different estimates about the size and evolution of the global middle class because of a lack of consensus on appropriate...

When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria...

The empirical evidence on the existence of social preferences-or lack thereof-is predominantly based on student samples. Yet, knowledge about whether these findings can be extended to the general population is still scarce. In this paper, we compare the distribution of social preferences in a...

The empirical evidence on the existence of social preferences-or lack thereof-is predominantly based on student samples. Yet, knowledge about whether these findings can be extended to the general population is still scarce. In this paper, we compare the distribution of social preferences in a...

Using newly comprehensive data and tools from the Global Consumption and Income Project or CGIP, covering most of the world and five decades, we present a portrait of the changing global distribution of consumption and income and discuss its implications for our understanding of inequality,...

This paper analyzes how changing the expected length of intellectual property right (IPR) protection affects growth and the welfare of rich and poor consumers. The analysis is based on a product-variety model with non-homothetic preferences and endogenous markups in which, in accordance with...

This paper introduces a theory-based equivalence scale for public in-kind transfers, which justifies comparison of distributions of extended income (cash income plus the value of public services) between European countries. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed equivalence scale in an...

This paper analyzes how changing the expected length of intellectual property (IP) protection affects economic growth and the welfare of rich and poor consumers. The analysis is based on a product-variety model with non-homothetic preferences and endogenous markups in which, in accordance with...

Within the context of the neoclassical growth model I investigate the implications of (initial) endowment inequality when the rich have a higher marginal savings rate than the poor. More unequal societies grow faster in the transition process, and therefore exhibit a higher speed of convergence....