Poor growth performance over the past decades in Europe has increased concerns for rising income dispersion and social exclusion. European authorities have recently launched the Europe 2020 strategy which aims to improve social inclusion in Europe on top of already existing European regional...

Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions.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...

The rate of homeownership is close to the OECD average in Luxembourg. However, strong house price increases, mainly driven by population growth and limited housing supply, led to a deterioration in affordability of housing, in particular for the young and added to the wealth gap between...

Despite an improvement in overall macroeconomic performance in Costa Rica, income inequality has risen and is currently at its maximum historical value. This is in stark contrast with other Latin American countries, which have recently made significant progress in reducing inequality. This study...

This paper presents the global income distribution between all individuals living in the developed world. Global inequality for the group of high-income countries, as measured by the Gini coefficient, stands at 37 in 2013 and has increased by almost 3 Gini points since the mid-1990s. This was...