This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on "Cross Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists''. The issue documents, for nine countries, the level and the evolution, over time and over the life cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality,...

In Italy, as in many other countries, the years immediately after 1929 were characterized by a major slowdown in economic activity. We argue that the depth and duration of the crisis cannot be explained solely by productivity shocks. We present a model in which trade restrictions together with...

We conduct a systematic empirical study of cross-sectional inequality in the United States, integrating data from the Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and the Survey of Consumer Finances. In order to understand how different...

This paper analyzes the quantitative role of idiosyncratic uncertainty in an economy in which rational agents vote on hypothetical social security reforms. We find that the role of a pay-as-you-go social security system as a partial insurance and redistribution device significantly reduces...

In this paper we first document inequality trends in wages, hours worked, earnings, consumption, and wealth for Germany from the last twenty years. We generally find that inequality was relatively stable in West Germany until the German Reunification, and then trended upwards for wages and...