Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions. We argue that tax policy is the driving force. Using long time-series from eight countries, we show that the fraction of household ownership decreases with...

We propose a first order bias correction term for the Gini index to reduce the bias due to grouping. The first order correction term is obtained from studying the estimator of the Gini index within a measurement error framework. In addition, it reveals an intuitive formula for the remaining...

We explore the relationship between import protection and the household distribution of income. We first develop a general-equilibrium mapping from tariffs to household inequality measures. This also yields predictions for linkages between tariffs, development level, and observed household...

We analyze general equilibrium relationships between trade policy and the household distribution of income, decomposing social welfare into real income level and variance components through Gini and Atkinson indexes. We embed these inequality-adjusted social welfare functions in a general...

The inequality dataset compiled in the 1990s by the World Bank and extendedby the UN has been both widely used and strongly criticized. The criticisms raisequestions about conclusions drawn from secondary inequality datasets in general. Wedevelop techniques to deal with national and...

Motivated by the lack of literature linking actual to perceived relative deprivation, this paper assesses the role of visibility in the deprivation of goods and assets vis-à-vis income behind perceptions of relative deprivation. We rely on household survey data that includes unique information...

We present evidence from a repeated survey on risky asset holdings carried out on a representative sample of the German population six times between April and June 2020. Given the size of the Covid-19 shock, we find little evidence of portfolio rebalancing in April 2020. In May, however,...

This paper investigates whether the size of the shadow economy increases income inequality in Uganda. This paper applies the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration, to test the long- and short-run relationship between the shadow economy and income...

This paper argues that the link between poverty and drug-related crime might be spurious. We take an empirical approach to investigate the causality and plausibility of this link. Firstly, we regress crime against envisaged explanatory variables in order to estimate the contribution of poverty...