Significant departures from log normality are observed in income data, in violation of Gibrat’s law. We identify a new empirical regularity, which is that the distribution of consumption expenditures across households is, within cohorts, closer to log normal than the distribution of income. We...

This paper provides a computable general equilibrium analysis of the medium to long-run impact of FDI inflows on poverty and income distribution in Bolivia. The simulation results suggest that FDI inflows enhance economic growth and reduce poverty. However, the income distribution typically...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person?s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

This paper reconsiders the political economy approach to growth and distribution according to which (1) rising inequality induces more government redistribution; (2) more government redistribution is financed by higher distortionary taxation; and (3) higher distortionary taxes reduce economic...

Zwei wesentliche Perspektiven, Arbeitslosigkeit zu untersuchen, sind die der Gerechtigkeit und die der Effizienz. Unverschuldete Arbeitslosigkeit wird als ungerecht empfunden. Zugleich wird häufig argumentiert, dass Arbeitslosigkeit zu gesellschaftlichen Wohlfahrtseinbußen führt, da Arbeit...

In this work, we study the short- and long-run properties of different inequality series vis-à-vis the most important macroeconomic series for a set of OECD countries. We employ standard tools of time series macro-econometrics (e.g. stationarity tests, detrending, co-movements analysis,...

In this paper we explore the statistical properties of the distributions of consumption expenditures for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. Goodness-of-fit tests show that household aggregate (and age-conditioned) consumption distributions are not log-normal. Rather,...

This article analyzes income redistribution in the inter-ethnic context. The model shows that redistribution in favor of less prosperous ethnic minorities raises fertility among the unskilled minority recipients, lowers fertility among the contributing local skilled, slows human capital...

Empirical analyses of economic inequality, poverty, and mobility in Germany are, to an increas-ing extent, using microdata from the German Federal Statistical Office's contribution to the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) as well as data from the German...

This paper examines the link between pollution and income. It shows how income inequality affects environmental policies and therefore pollution. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis proposes that there is an inverted U-shape relation between environmental degradation and income per...