The relationship between inequality and growth has attracted a lot of attention in the previous literature. Estimation of this relationship may be biased by simultaneity, omitted variables and measurement error. The present paper contributes to the existing work by introducing the wealth Gini...

This article provides a short description of remitters in Dubai. The data comes from a remittance survey on foreign workers in the Emirate conducted in 2008. Among other findings, our results suggest that there are key differences between those remitters who live in labour camps and those living...

We study the income concentration in the Swiss federation over the course of the 20th century using federal income tax statistics. The results suggest that top incomes in Switzerland evolved over time rather remaining constant across different income shares. Income concentration peaked during...

Based on a relative entropy approach, this paper proposes a method to estimate or update transition matrices using just cross-sectional observations at two points in time. The method is then applied to explain the development of the US income distribution. Starting from three hypothesized...

We present an integration based procedure for predicting the distribution f of an indicator of interest in situations where, in addition to the sample data, one has access to covariates that are available for the entire population. The proposed method, based on similar ideas that have been used...

In this paper, relations between public debt, economic growth, and long-term interest rates in Switzerland from 1894 to 2014 are examined. For this purpose, an original long-term dataset on the general gross public debt in Switzerland, namely the aggregation of the Confederation gross debt, the...

So far the discussion in Switzerland about the social costs and benefits of higher capital requirements resulting from the new Basel III Accord and the Swiss Too Big To Fail legislation has been heavily qualitative. This paper provides a quantitative view and estimates the long-run costs and...

In this paper we use principal components augmented regressions (PCARs), partly in conjunction with model averaging, to determine the variables relevant for economic growth. The use of PCARs allows to effectively tackle two major problems that the empirical growth literature faces: (i) the...