The authors estimate changes in the distribution of household consumption expenditure in Namibia since Independence in 1990 and the effects on poverty. To produce comparability between two household surveys, they use survey matching techniques and apply the framework of stochastic dominance to...

Despite the recovery of economic growth in Latin America during the 1990s, rising unemployment, high informality rates and sluggish wages lie at the root of high inequality and poverty. This paper looks at changes in hourly earnings from the early 1990s to the early 2000s in three relatively...

This paper studies how heterogeneity in income dynamics affects the POUM hypothesis (the idea that poor people do not support high level of redistribution because they hope to be rich in the future). We consider a setting where individuals evaluate their expected future income using both their...

We provide an analytical-behavioral explanation for the observed positive relationship between income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, and the incentive to migrate. We show that a higher total relative deprivation of a population leads to a stronger incentive to engage in...

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed redistributive effect for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. Applying inequality indices and Fields’ (2001) decomposition methodology to Bolivian household survey data of the years 1989 to 1997, we identify recent trends...

In recent decades, many countries experienced both a rise in top income shares and an increase of income inequality among the top earners. In this paper, I study the role of international trade as a catalyst for this development and analyze the associated welfare effects. I build a simple...

We develop a generalized approach to the treatment of household inequality aspects of social welfare in general equilibrium models of trade. We follow a dual approach, highlighting how general equilibrium distributional aspects of social welfare related to import protection may be examined...

Leaky-bucket transactions can be regarded as a generalization of the transfer principle allowing for transaction costs. In its most rudimentary form, leaky-bucket transactions trace out the maximum leakage of transaction costs such that a transfer still pays at the margin. Yet - to pay at the...