The paper uses the data from Francois Quesnay's writings to derive a social table for pre-revolutionary France, estimate country's mean income and income distribution. These Quesnay-based estimates are compared with more recent estimates of 18th century French incomes and inequality

Using for the first time survey data from 26 post-Communist countries, covering the period 1990-2005, the paper examines correlates of unprecedented increases in inequality registered by most of these economies. We find that, after controlling for country-fixed effects and type of survey used,...

Suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics: country where they live and social class within that country. Assume further that there is no migration. We show that 90 percent of variability in people's global income position (percentile in world income...

Consumption baskets vary across households and inflation rates vary across goods. As a result, standard consumer price index (CPI) inflation may provide a misleading measure of the inflation actually faced by poor households, more so the more unequal the distribution of aggregate consumption...

The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non-random attrition from the...

We analyze general equilibrium relationships between trade policy and the household distribution of income, decomposing social welfare into real income level and variance components and emphasizing Gini and Atkinson indexes. We embed these inequality adjusted social welfare functions in a...

This paper offers evidence on the relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment and informal employment, and identifies some of the lessons learned on the potential effects of increasing the minimum wage. Most of the evidence suggests that sizable increases in the minimum wage are...

This paper investigates the effect of multiple minimum wages, known as remuneration orders, on employment and working hours in Mauritius. Using data between 2004 and 2014, the analysis indicates that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wages brings about a slightly positive effect on employment...

This paper discusses the impact of a gradual, pre-announced significant increase of the minimum wage during 2013?16 in Romania. The main finding is that the positive effects prevail when the starting level of increase in the minimum wage is very low and the economy is in a negative output gap....

This paper explores the effects of a large minimum wage hike on firm exits from the formal economy, and its associated impacts on employment and informality. It uses an exceptionally rich linked employer-employee dataset on the universe of formal firms and workers in a developing economy. Data...