International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex...

This paper discusses two issues in the relationship between inequality and economic growth: the data and the econometrics. We first review the inequality data set of Deininger and Squire, which, we argue, fails to provide adequate or accurate longitudinal and cross-country coverage. We then...