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...

Benefit incidence analysis (BIA) is a tool used to assess how tax policy or government subsidy affects the distribution of welfare in the population. In other words, it evaluates the distribution of government subsidies among different groups in the population, in particular, among different...

In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian during 1967-2000. We find that the substantial...

High-quality data on state-level inequality and incomes, panel data on corruption convictions, and careful attention to the consequences of including or excluding fixed effects in the panel specification allow us to estimate the impact of income considerations on the decision to undertake...

There are two main types of data sources of income distributions in China: household survey data and grouped data. Household survey data are typically available for isolated years and individual provinces. In comparison, aggregate or grouped data are typically available more frequently and...

This paper examines the nature and extent of global and regional income distribution and inequality using the most recent country level data on income distribution drawn from World Bank and UNU-WIDER studies for the period 1993-2000. The methodology used is a recently developed technique to fit...

This paper presents a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of trade liberalization on the labor markets of developing countries. We discuss models which seek to explain the empirical finding that openness has increased wage inequality in several developing countries.

Should education be subsidized for the purpose ofredistribution? The usual argument against subsidies to education abovethe primary level is that the rich take up most education, soa subsidy would increase inequality. We show that there is acounteracting effect: an increase in the stock of human...

The paper investigates the effectiveness of the median voter as a decisive agent in the process of redistribution. According to the previous literature, it tests several assumptions finding interesting results: The positive relation between inequality and redistribution is confirmed, but the...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking Lorenz curves in situations where the Lorenz curves intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker ranking criteria than first-degree Lorenz dominance. To deal with such situations two alternative sequences of...