The contribution of this paper is to derive an optimal redistribution scheme for trade gains in the case of a government's objective function that explicitly accounts for the equity-efficiency trade-off. The government pays unemployment benefits (UB) either financed by a wage tax, a payroll tax...

The paper proposes a technique to jointly tests for groupings of unknown size in the cross sectional dimension of a panel and estimates the parameters of each group, and applies it to identifying convergence clubs in income per-capita. The approach uses the predictive density of the data,...

This paper surveys selected applications of the Lorenz curve and related stochastic orders in economics and econometrics, with a bias towards problems in statistical distribution theory. These include characterizations of income distributions in terms of families of inequality measures, Lorenz...

The paper analyzes the labor market effects of globalization when foreign market entry is costly and risky. With flexible labor markets, a fall in foreign market entry cost tends to generate more income inequality. By contrast, when workers cannot easily switch industries and wages are...

This paper surveys selected applications of the Lorenz curve and related stochastic orders in economics and econometrics, with a bias towards problems in statistical distribution theory. These include characterizations of income distributions in terms of families of inequality measures, Lorenz...

The paper studies the effects of cross-country differences in the productionprocess of human capital on income distribution and growth. Our overlapping gen-erations economy has the following features: (1) consumers are heterogenous withrespect to parental human capital and wealth; (2)...

The paper examines the effect of heterogeneity in individual human capital formation on cross-country income inequality. It considers a two-country model of overlapping generation heterogeneous economies with the following features: (1) individuals are heterogeneous with respect to inborn...

This paper develops a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980. Under realistic assumptions, we find that all agents can benefit from the...

The link between income inequality and governmental redistribution is still subject to intense research and debate. Starting with the median-voter-hypothesis, a plethora of theoretical models have been developed during the last three decades to identify and explain possible causal relationships....

This paper examines the link between pollution and income. It shows how income inequality affects environmental policies and therefore pollution. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis proposes that there is an inverted U-shape relation between environmental degradation and income per...