Distributions of many variables of interest in developed economic and financial markets, including income and wealth, exhibit heavy tails as in the case of Pareto or power laws. Many commonly used income and wealth inequality measures are very sensitive to extremes and outliers generated by...

In this contribution we study the relationship between income inequality and economic freedom for a panel of 100 countries for the 1971-2010 period. From a panel causality study we find that income inequality has a negative causal effect on economic freedom, while causation does not run in the...

Significant deterioration in health and income inequality in Ukraine as well as in other CIS countries during the early transition motivated us to investigate the relationship between the two categories. Based on both macro- and micro-data analysis we focused on how different aspects of health...

Empirical analyses on inequality measurement and those in other fields in economics and finance often face the difficulty that the data is correlated, heterogeneous or heavy-tailed in some unknown fashion. The paper focuses on analogues and modifications of the recently developed t-statistic...

A new database for the calculation of quarterly income inequality measures was established for 11 economies from Central, East and Southeast Europe for the period of 1st quarter 2000 to 4th quarter 2011. Based on the large panel of the acquired quarterly Gini coefficients an ‘Acemoglu-style'...

In the analysis short- and medium term effects of the crisis on household income levels by deciles and on overall inequality and poverty measures are described for the period 2008 to 2011 for Bulgaria and Romania. For the subsequent period of 2011 to 2015 we apply household stress tests. Both...

This paper points to flaws in Gini decompositions by income sources and population subgroups and to common pitfalls in the interpretation of decomposition results, focusing on methods within the framework of Rao (1969). We argue that within this framework Gini elasticities may provide the only...

A large literature has documented top income share series based on income tax statistics using the common methodology established by Piketty (2001, 2003). The disappearance of capital income from the income tax base in many countries poses a major challenge to the comparability of these series...

We study the influence of income inequality on terrorism. Using cross-national data for 79 countries for the 2002-2012 period, we show that endogeneity matters to the inequalityterrorism relationship, e.g., because of the distributional effects of terrorism. Once endogeneity is properly...

Income inequality is a major public concern in many Western countries. The problem has intensified with the recent high immigration rates in Europe, particularly from outside the continent. However, the linkage between refugee immigration and income inequality in host countries has not been...