The paper uses a new country-level, panel data set to study the effect of public sector wages on corruption. The results show that wage inequality in the public sector is an important determinant of the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies. Increasing the wages of public officials could...

Despite the well-known positive impact of tobacco taxes on health outcomes, policy makers hesitate to use them because of their possible regressive effect, that is, poorer deciles are proportionally more negatively affected than richer ones. Using an extended cost-benefit analysis to estimate...

Colombia has reduced extreme poverty in the past 16 years by almost half, moderate poverty by 22 percentage points, and made more than four million Colombians jump the threshold of multidimensional poverty. However, it remains one of the most unequal countries in the region, after Brazil and...

The Russian Federation offers the unique example of a leading centrally planned economy swiftly transforming itself into a market-oriented economy. This paper offers a comprehensive study of inequality and mobility patterns for Russia, using multiple rounds of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring...

Tobacco taxes have positive impacts on health outcomes. However, policy makers often hesitate to use them because of the perception that poorer households are affected disproportionally more than richer households. This study compares the simulated distributional effects of tobacco tax increases...