On the website of their recent book Pour une Revolution Fiscale, Landais, Piketty and Saez (2011) have provided the public with free access to all their quantitative data, inviting the readership to critically appraise and publicly discuss their work. Unfortunately, the book's graphical...

We provide the first theoretical analysis of altruism in networks. Agents are embedded in a fixed, weighted network and care about their direct friends. Given some initial distribution of incomes, they may decide to support their poorer friends. We study the resulting non-cooperative transfer...

This paper uses data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine some of the forces that have driven changes in household income inequality over the last three decades of the 20th century. We decompose inequality for 6 countries (Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US) into the...

Our paper contributes by bridging the gap between the (partial equilibrium) microsimulation and the computable general equilibrium (CGE) approaches, by making use of exact aggregation results from the discrete choice literature: heterogeneous individuals choosing within a set of discrete...

Under the the assumption that income y is a power function of its rank among n individuals, we approximate the coefficient of variation and gini index as functions of the power degree of the Pen's parade. Reciprocally, for a given coefficient of variation or gini index, we propose the analytic...

Using a new set of micro evidence from an original survey of 28 transition countries, we show that democracy increases citizens' support for the market by guaranteeing income redistribution to inequality-averse agents. Our identification strategy relies on the restriction of the sample to...

Building on the existing literature, a synthetic approach intended to ease the understanding of the notion of inequality of opportunity is developed. In turn, this paper tests a convincing hypothesis explaining the mixed evidence found by empirical studies regarding the instrumental effect of...

In this paper, we propose a simple way to compute the Gini index when income y is a finite order k polynomial function of its rank among n individuals.

A large literature has studied the impact of labour market institutions on wage inequality, but their effect on income inequality has received little attention. In this paper we argue that personal income inequality is a function of the wage differential, the labour share, and the unemployment...

According to the literature, the effect of remittances on income inequality in origin countries of migrants is not clear, whatever empirical approach is used. Aiming at clearing up this ambiguity, some authors took into account the historical, social or economic context of the home countries...