Conventional wisdom about the relationship between income distribution and economicdevelopment has been subjected to dramatic transformations in the past century. Whileclassical economists advanced the hypothesis that inequality is beneficial for growth, theneoclassical paradigm dismissed the...

This paper estimates trends in absolute poverty in urban China from 1988 to 2002 using the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) surveys. Poverty incidence curves are plotted, showing that poverty has fallen markedly during the period regardless of the exact location of the poverty line...

This paper proposes a new unified theory of sociobehavioral forces. The goal of the new theory isto integrate theories describing five sociobehavioral processes - comparison (including justiceand self-esteem), status, power, identity, and happiness - bringing under a single theoreticalumbrella...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to anincrease in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfaredepend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data onconsumption and income to...

This paper develops a framework for studying individuals ideas about what constitutes justcompensation for chief executive officers (CEOs) and reports estimates of just CEO pay andthe principles guiding ideas of justice. The sample consists of students pursuing a Master ofBusiness Administration...

In spite of there being few elements of tax or cash benefit systems in developed countriesthat are any longer explicitly gender-biased in a discriminatory sense, it is well recognisedthat they have significant gender effects. To the extent that women earn less than men onaverage under...

When treatment effects of active labour market programmes are heterogeneous in anobservable way across the population, the allocation of the unemployed into differentprogrammes becomes a particularly important issue. In this paper, we present a statisticalmodel designed to improve the present...

A large empirical literature documents a rise in wage inequality in the American economy. Itis silent on whether the increase in inequality is due to greater heterogeneity in thecomponents of earnings that are predictable by agents or whether it is due to greateruncertainty faced by agents...

Differences in geopolitical regions of Nigeria are not debatable. However, there is no clearconsensus on the dimension of these disparities. In this paper, claims of geopolitical regiondisparities in labor market outcomes are investigated using survey data from Nigeria between1996-1999...

To assess the impact of tax-benefit policy changes on income distribution over time, wesuggest a methodology based on counterfactual simulations. We start by decomposingchanges in inequality/poverty indices into three contributions: reforms of the tax-benefitstructure (rules, rates, etc.),...