Long-run trends in Africa’s well-being are provided on the basis of a new index of human development, alternative to the UNDP’s HDI. A sustained improvement in African human development is found that falls, nonetheless, short of those experienced in other developing regions. Within Africa,...

A basic tenet of economic science is that productivity growth is the source of growth in real income per capita. But our results raise doubts by creating a direct link between macro productivity growth and the micro evolution of the income distribution. We show that over the entire period...

It is a persistent finding in psychology and experimental economics that people's behavior is not only shaped by outcomes but also by decision-making procedures. In this paper we develop a general framework capable of modelling these procedural concerns. Within the context of psychological games...

In an overlapping generations model, rents to human capital play a key role in increasing savings. In the absence of such rents, the return to human capital is entirely appropriated by the old and accumulation is entirely determined by the income to fixed factors. If rents are introduced by...

In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age-structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian over the period 1967-2000. We find that the...

This Paper first documents the evolution of the cross-sectional income and consumption distribution in the US in the past 25 years. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey we find that a rising income inequality has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise in consumption inequality....

We assume that individuals can fully insure themselves against cross-country shocks, but not against individual-specific shocks. We consider two particular models of limited risk-sharing: domestically incomplete markets (DI) and private information-Pareto optimal (PIPO) risk-sharing. For each...

While increasing income inequality in China has been commented on and studied extensively, relatively little analysis is available on inequality in other dimensions of human development. Using data from different sources, this Paper presents some basic facts on the evolution of spatial...

This paper systematically examines the role of fiscal policy, trade and energy taxes on environmental quality in Europe using disaggregated data for 12 European countries over the 1995-2008 period. It uses a methodology that obtains estimates mostly free of time-varying omitted variable biases....

This paper develops a model that integrates the climate and the global economy---an integrated assessment model---with which different policy scenarios can be analyzed and compared. The model is a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium setup with a continuum of regions. Thus, it is a full...