Drawing on a comprehensive compilation of quantile shares and inequality measures for 34 countries, including over 5,600 estimated Gini coefficients, we review the measurement of income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last seven decades. We find that there is quite a bit...

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...

This paper analyzes the individual-level determinants of wage inequality for Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador from 2001 to 2010. Using a rich annual data set from surveys in all three countries, we analyze wages both using conventional wage regressions and decompositions of standard Gini indices....

This paper analyzes the microeconomic sources of wage inequality in the United States from 1967-2012. Decomposing inequality into factors categorized by degree of personal responsibility, we find that education is able to explain more than twice as much of inequality today as 45 years ago....

This study contributes to the literature on inequality of opportunity (IOp) in China by covering a longer and more recent span of time, employing better measures of given characteristics, and analyzing IOp for household income per capita with comparisons to individual income. Furthermore, we...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from socialpsychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

We offer an explanation for the inconclusive results of empirical studies into the relationship between the magnitude of the Gini coefficient of income distribution at origin and the intensity of migration. Bearing in mind the substantial literature that identifies relative deprivation as an...

We use Pareto imputation, survey reweighting, and microsimulation methods applied to combined household survey and tax return data to reevaluate distributional consequences of the post-socialist transition in Poland. Our approach results in the first estimates of top-corrected inequality trends...

The merger of populations expands the comparison space of incomes. As a result, measures of the income-based social stress and of the income inequality of the constituent populations need to be replaced by new measures. To this end, we develop a procedure for calculating the aggregate social...