Since Aristotle, a vast literature has suggested that economic inequality has important political consequences. Higher inequality is thought to increase demand for government income redistribution in democracies and to discourage democratization and promote class conflict and revolution in...

The public health measures implemented by governments to limit the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic will produce significant economic consequences that are likely to exacerbate social and economic inequalities. In this paper we provide a framework to analyse how income inequality, besides other...

This paper studies the pro-poor bias of contemporary trade policy in India by estimating the household welfare effects of eliminating the current protection structure. The elimination of a pro-poor trade policy is expected to have lower welfare gains or higher welfare loss at the low end of the...

This paper examines the relationship between financial development, CO2 emissions, trade and economic growth using simultaneous-equation panel data models for a panel of 12 MENA countries over the period 1990-2011. Our results indicate that there is evidence of bidirectional causality between...

We test whether financial fluctuations affect firms' decisions, through their impact on banks' cost of funding. We exploit two shocks to Italian bank CDS spreads and equity valuations: the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the 2010-2012 sovereign debt crisis. Using newly available data linking over...

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...

We examine the (potentially nonlinear) relationship between inequality and growth using a method which does not require an a priori assumption on the underlying functional form. This approach reveals a plateau completely missed by commonly used (nonlinear) parametric approaches - the economy...

Is the brain drain a curse or a boon for developing countries? This paper reviews what is known to date about the magnitude of the brain drain from developing to developed countries, its determinants and the way it affects the well-being of those left behind. First, I present alternative...