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...

This paper examines several mainstream explanations of the financial crisis and stagnation and the role they attribute to income inequality. Those explanations are contrasted with a structural Keynesian explanation. The role of income inequality differs substantially, giving rise to different...

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...

In his widely discussed book "Fault Lines" (2010), Raghuram Rajan argues that many U.S. consumers have reacted to the decline in their relative permanent incomes since the early 1980s by reducing saving and increasing debt. This has temporarily kept private consumption and thus aggregate demand...

In this paper we demonstrate that interpersonal comparisons do not only influence people's level of utility but also lead to "keeping up with the Joneses"-behavior as reference consumption substantially affects households' consumption-savings decisions. By applying the insights from the...

Germany entered the euro with a current account deficit but over theentire past decade has run large and persistent current account surpluses. Besides joining the common currency, the increase of Germany's current account since the late 1990s has been accompanied by strong shifts in thepersonal...

This paper examines the relationship between inequality and growth in the neo-Kaleckian and Cambridge growth models. The paper explores the channels whereby functional and personal income distribution impact growth. The growth - inequality relationship can be negative or positive, depending on...