This paper revisits trends in bank privatization and analyzes their economic impact over the past 25 years. Building on a novel data set of privatization events for 70 developed and developing countries, it shows that bank privatization became more frequent since the Global Financial Crisis,...

This study connects two important findings in Sub-Saharan Africa. First, digital technologies such as mobile money have become widespread and have increased investment by businesses, especially in East Africa. Second, women-owned business in the region significantly lag their male counterparts...

This paper argues that labor supply elasticities encode information about the determinants of income inequality. In the theoretical framework, individuals choose labor supply conditional on productivities and preferences for consumption relative to leisure. The paper shows that reduced-form...

This study assesses the redistributive impact of fiscal policy -- including expenditures and taxation -- in the Arab Republic of Egypt. Using a broadly applied methodology, a fiscal incidence analysis is conducted using survey and government data for fiscal year 2015. Evidence shows that...

This paper studies future poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity outcomes using a panel data set with 150 countries over 1980-2014. The findings suggest that global extreme poverty will decrease in absolute and relative terms in the period 2015-2030. However, absolute poverty is likely to...

This paper uses methods developed by the Commitment to Equity Institute and data from the Household Budget Survey to assess the effects of government taxation and social spending on poverty and inequality in Moldova. The paper presents the first detailed distributional analysis of the tax and...