This paper explores the role of macroeconomic factors and structural policies in shaping the distribution of labour income. Technological change and globalisation play at least some role in driving inequality patterns, but structural policy can also have an important influence on inequality...

Income and earning inequality has been on the rise in most of the OECD and in many emerging economies since the 1980s. This paper estimates a model of earnings inequality across OECD countries that incorporates determinants of relative demand and supply of more and less-skilled labour. Drawing...

This paper addresses the often neglected question of how macroeconomic risk is shared across and within economies, and identifies reforms that could contribute towards achieving more desirable risksharing outcomes. For risk-sharing across countries, the paper discusses possibilities for...

The wealth distribution within OECD countries is very concentrated and much more so than the income distribution. Wealth dispersion is especially high in the United States and Sweden. The latter illustrates that the most wealth unequal countries are not necessarily the most income unequal....

Unconditional and conditional quantile regressions are used to explore the determinants of labour earnings at different parts of the distribution and, hence, the determinants of overall labour earnings inequality. The analysis combines several household surveys to provide comparable estimates...

Over the past decades, top incomes have soared, especially in the English-speaking countries. Despite a considerable amount of research on top income developments, there is still substantial disagreement about the causes for their rapid increase. Potential explanations include changes in...

This paper examines how the the distributive impact of macroeconomic shocks is shaped by selected institutions. It uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework with heterogeneous agents and an endogenous collateral constraint. The model is based on the “credit view” of...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the effects of structural policies on household disposable incomes at different income levels. More specifically, it investigates the extent to which structural policies have differential long-run impacts on GDP per capita and on household incomes at...

This paper provides an assessment of how households’ income has fared compared with GDP. While the prime focus is on incomes around the median, attention is paid also to the bottom of the income distribution. Thus, one contribution of the paper is to deliver a fresh assessment of the evolution...

Under the Universal Credit reform, the main means-tested benefits except the Council Tax Benefit will be pooled into one single benefit with one single taper rate. The reform will give people better incentives to work, reduce complexity and contribute to reducing poverty. The reform could reduce...