In this paper, I first summarize how the US Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) operates and describe the characteristics of recipients. I then discuss empirical work on the effects of the EITC on poverty and income distribution, and its effects on labor supply. Next, I discuss a few policy concerns...

The literature on public employment policies such as the job guarantee (JG) and the employer of last resort (ELR) often emphasizes their macroeconomic stabilization effects. But carefully designed and implemented policies like these can also have profound social transformative effects. In...

This paper explores the relationship between income inequality and growth using panel data on Swedish counties from 1960-2000. Compared to standard methods of estimating this relationship yearly regional level data are used, and inequality is allowed to be endogenous. We find a significant...

We estimate trends in global earnings dispersion across occupational groups using a new database covering 66 developed and developing countries between 1970 and 2015. Our main finding is that global earnings inequality has declined, primarily during the 2000s, when the global Gini coefficient...

Over the last two decades, those at the bottom of the income scale have seen their incomes stagnate, while those at the top have seen theirs skyrocket. Without intervention, the recession that began in December 2007 was likely to exacerbate this trend. Will the American Recovery and Reinvestment...

The question of whether changes in income inequality affect CO2 emissions remains a topic of debate at both theoretical and empirical levels. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of changes in the full spectre of income distribution on consumptionbased CO2 emissions per capita. To...

Although people's perception of (income or wealth) inequality has important e_ects on their decisions as economic agents or voters, little is known about how perceptions relate to measured inequality. We present a novel formal framework that is based on the assumption that people typically do...

In this paper, the amount of income redistribution in the United States, the European Union, and Switzerland is compared and empirically related to economic, political, and behavioral determinants elaborated in the literature. Lying in between the two poles, Switzerland provides unique evidence...

The empirical evidence suggests that parents use inter vivos gifts (i.e., transfers of tangible and financial property) to compensate less well off children whereas post mortem bequests are divided equally among siblings. We study a theoretical model assuming, first, that the amounts given is...