It is sometimes argued that poorer people choose to work less, implying less welfare inequality than suggested by observed incomes. Social policies have also acknowledged that efforts differ, and that people respond to incentives. Prevailing measures of inequality (in outcomes or opportunities)...

Low response rates among rich households are thought to be a serious problem in many applications using household surveys. The paper discusses the various ways the problem can be dealt with, and makes some recommendations for practice, including in developing countries. Under certain conditions,...

The path of income inequality in post-reform China has been widely interpreted as "China's Kuznets curve." We show that the Kuznets growth model of structural transformation in a dual economy, alongside population urbanization, has little explanatory power for our new series of inequality...

Current global inequality measures assume that national-mean income does not matter to economic welfare at given household income, as measured in surveys. The paper questions that assumption on theoretical and empirical grounds and finds that prominent stylized facts about global inequality are...

How does income from international migrant labor affect the long-run development of migrant-origin areas? We leverage the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis to identify exogenous changes in international migrant income across regions of the Philippines, derived from spatial variation in exposure to...