Taxes and transfers can have significant impacts on poverty and inequality. All standard measures are by definition anonymous in the sense that we do not know the identity of winners and losers. That a given combination of taxes and transfers makes some of the poor poorer, however, may be...

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...

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...

We apply a standard tax and benefit incidence analysis to estimate the impact on inequality and poverty of direct taxes, indirect taxes and subsidies, and social spending (cash and food transfers and in-kind transfers in education and health). The extent of inequality reduction induced by direct...