This paper provides an analysis of the social consequences of people seeking to keep up with the Joneses. All individuals attempt to reach a higher rank than the Joneses, including the Joneses themselves. This attitude gives rise to an equilibrium in which all individuals have equal utilities...

We consider a rationally inattentive screener who evaluates a pool of candidates composed of distinct and observable social categories. There is heterogeneity across categories in the costs of being screened, the degree of bias faced in the screening process, and the costs of investment in...

This paper studies whether limited information about inequality accounts for the (optimistic) beliefs and the (anti-tax) preferences of American voters. Unlike standard surveys, this experiment examines preferences for taxation while controlling for perceived economic opportunity, beliefs about...

We describe a simple method to obtain kindred stationary densities of random Markov processes with respect to an Ito transformation function. As applied to income and wealth densities, they are akin to one another because they share the income growth and income volatility shape parameters. The...

In a context of high economic uncertainty, this paper aims to analyse the impacts of uncertainty on income and wealth inequality in the four largest economies of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy and Spain. This is the first study to evaluate this relationship in these countries and the...

We consider the cost of providing incentives using tournaments when workers are inequity averse and performance evaluation is costly. The principal never benefits from empathy to align incentives in a moral hazard framework between the workers, but he may benefit from their propensity for envy...

The extent to which local communities benefit from commodity booms has been subject to wide but inconclusive investigations. This paper draws from a new district-level database to investigate the local impact on socioeconomic outcomes of mining activity in Peru, which grew almost twentyfold in...

Pro Poor Growth has become a central concern to achieve sustainable poverty reduction in developing countries. Despite being widely used, the term is not well-defined nor has there been a clear policy document that would summarize the determinants and policy implications of pro poor growth. This...

We examine economic growth, inequality and education when the wellspring of growth is the formation of human capital through a combination of the quality of child-rearing and formal schooling. The existence of multiple steady states is established, including a poverty trap, wherein children work...

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy...