A model is developed for peasant households in land abundant areas who choose between two technologies for land preparation: a manual one and one using draught animals. For draught a minimum number of animals is required so that a technological non convexity exists. It follows that certain...

Income and wealth inequality rose over the first 150 years of US history. They rose in Britain before 1875, especially 1740–1810. The first half of the 20th century equalized pre-fisc incomes both in Britain and in America. From the 1970s to the 1990s inequality rose in both countries,...

We study beliefs about wealth inequality and preferences for wealth redistribution. For this, we conduct a large-scale online survey in Germany. First, we analyze how well participants are informed about the German wealth distribution and their position in it. Second, we investigate how...

Understanding wealth inequality has unique significance in South Africa. The coexistence of extreme poverty and extreme wealth is starkly visible. Apartheid-era inequality has persisted despite more than 20 years of democracy. Much of the research on inequality has focused on inequality of...

Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century posits the return r on capital to be larger than the economic growth rate g as a main driver of inequalities. This article points out the circumstances under which the reverse inference holds. We show that increasing inequality promotes increasing...

As embodied in the concept of "inequality extraction" (Branko Milanovic), it is not possible to increase inequality (especially income inequality) in a society sustainably to levels beyond what is actually socially acceptable (and even less to levels endangering physical subsistence of parts of...

The Great Recession had a tremendous impact on low-income Americans, in particular black and Latino Americans. The losses in terms of employment and earnings are matched only by the losses in terms of real wealth. In many ways, however, these losses are merely a continuation of trends that have...

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint...

The measurement of Inequality of Opportunity has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, despite of the fact that it is very limited by the scarce availability of data on family background. In this paper we propose a method to overcome this limitation, which consists of using another...

In this article, we show the evolution of inequality for the largest economies of the Latin American region in the 21st century, with separate consideration of income and wealth. We analyse the drivers of the changes in inequality and possible underlying causes, including the role of the new...