Two conversion schemes may be employed for assessing income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and explain the...

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity (TFP) in Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000–2008. The Brazilian experience is instructive as it is a case of an economy that expanded aggregate exports significantly, but with stagnant aggregate TFP...

Aphorisms that “rising tides raise all boats” or that material advances of the rich eventually “trickle down” to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income/wellbeing paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications...

This paper examines three possible approaches to pro-poor growth. The first one assumes that the poverty line remains constant in real terms over time. The second perspective examines the case where the poverty line is equal to half the median of the income distribution but assumes that such a...

This paper proposes a multidimensional procedure for jointly assessing the absolute and relative pro-poorness of growth. It is also a procedure for testing whether poverty comparisons can be made over classes of indices that incorporate both absolute and relative views of poverty. Besides being...

The most popular general univariate polarization indexes for discrete and continuous variables are extended and combined to describe the extent of polarization between agents in a distribution defined over a collection of many discrete and continuous agent characteristics. A formula for the...

Distributive value judgments based on the ‘origins’ of economic inequalities (e.g. circumstances and responsible choices) are increasingly evoked to argue that ‘the worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal’. However, one may reasonably agree that distributive value...

The authors analyze to what extent and how the tax burden should be shifted towards top income earners in order to reduce income inequality. Starting from Lambert and Aronson (Inequality decomposition analysis and the Gini coefficient revisited 1993) and Alvaredo (A note on the relationship...

We analyse the effect of shocks to housing wealth and income before and after the Great Recession. We combine datasets containing information on expenditure, income, wealth and debt in a synthetic panel to understand how household indebtedness affects the response to income and wealth shocks.We...

Time-varying parameter (TVP) models have the potential to be over-parameterized, particularly when the number of variables in the model is large. Global-local priors are increasingly used to induce shrinkage in such models. But the estimates produced by these priors can still have appreciable...