This paper investigates the importance of accounting for the profile of inequality in the analysis of institutional trust. Drawing on individual data from 82 countries around the world over the 1981-2021 period, it sheds light on the potential limitations of exploring the impact of the income...

The long-run U-shaped patterns of economic inequality are standardly explained by basic economic trends (Piketty’s rg), taxation policies, or “great levelers,” like catastrophes. This paper argues that housing policy, in particular rent control, is a neglected explanatory factor in...

Using the 2004 income survey of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office we consider the targeting of two types of unemployment-related benefits: a) unemployment insurance and re-training benefits and b) the unemloyment assistance (UA). The evidence suggests that unemployment-related benefits...

In this paper we develop a quantitative model of entrepreneurial activity (risk-taking) and consumer bankruptcy choices and use the model to study the effects of bankruptcy regulations on entrepreneurial activity, bankruptcy rate and welfare. We show that eliminating bankruptcy exemptions leads...

I find here that the early 2000s witnessed both exploding debt and the middle-class squeeze. While median wealth grew briskly in the late 1990s, it fell slightly between 2001 and 2004, while the inequality of net worth increased slightly. Indebtedness, which fell substantially during the late...

Using a VAR model of the American economy from 1984 to 2003, we find that, contrary to official claims, the Federal Reserve does not target inflation or react to inflation signals.ʺ Rather, the Fed reacts to the very realʺ signal sent by unemployment, in a way that suggests that a baseless...

This paper begins by proposing two cardinal measures of inequality in life chances. Using as its database a matrix in which the lines correspond to the social category of parents and the columns to the income distribution of their children, it then highlights the importance of the marginal...

This paper summarizes the background, type, logic, and working procedure of the statistical matching used in the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) project to combine the various data sets used to produce the synthetic data set with which the LIMEW is constructed. The authors...

I measure the rate of aversion to inequality in consumption as expressed in the development aid given by rich countries to poor ones between 1965 and 2005. Over time, OECD countries have become less concerned about international inequity. Even for a fairly leaky bucket, the consumption rate of...