Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes three methodological...

Individual income is determined by free-will actions related to the level of effort exerted and by opportunities determined by aspects beyond the individual's control, such as family background, race, place of birth or health endowments. Taking human capital as the main engine of development, we...

We axiomatically characterize two classes of poverty measures which are sensitive to inequality of opportunity - one a strict subset of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to differences in opportunities faced by people with...

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. We construct two new metadata...

Conventional wisdom predicts that changes in macroeconomic conditions significantly affect income inequality. In this paper we hypothesize that the way in which macroeconomic conditions affect inequality depends on how these conditions influence the constituents of total inequality: inequality...

Using family income from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we apply Quantile Regression to estimate the Intergenerational Income Elasticity (IGE) by percentiles in the U.S. from 1980 to 2010. For the whole period, the IGE shows a Ushape across the income distribution, with maximum...