This paper provides a new data set of regional income inequalities within countries based on satellite nighttime light data. We first empirically study the relationship between luminosity data and regional incomes for those countries where regional income data are available. We subsequently use...

There has been growing literature focusing on empirical evaluation of the key determinants of income distribution across the countries for the last three decades. The present study aims to assess the impact of political regime and shadow economy on income inequalities in Pakistan over the period...

We ask whether, as many seem to think, corruption worsens, and judicial accountability improves, inequality, and investigate this empirically using data from 145 countries 1960–2014. We relate perceived corruption and de facto judicial accountability to gross-income inequality and consumption...

This paper studies the impact of tax-financed universal health coverage schemes on macroeconomic aspects of labor supply, asset holding, inequality, and welfare, while taking into account features common to developing economies, such as informal employment and tax avoidance, by constructing a...

The informal sector is an extensive phenomenon in developing countries. While some of its implications have drawn considerable attention in the literature, one relatively unexplored aspect has to do with the saving patterns of workers and firms and how these might influence aggregate savings and...

This paper applies the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing method to investigate the long- and short-run relationship between the size of the shadow economy and income inequality in Uganda. The findings reveal evidence of the long and short-run relationship between the shadow economy...

This paper provides evidence on the impact of major epidemics from the past two decades on income distribution. The pandemics in our sample, even though much smaller in scale than COVID-19, have led to increases in the Gini coefficient, raised the income share of higher-income deciles, and...

Governments around the world engage in fiscal interventions targeting the poor. Using a rich dataset on income and consumption of Indian households, we estimate the distributional effects of such interventions in a heterogeneous agent model. The standard scheme of interventions that consistently...

This paper presents a novel technique to measure and compare the redistributive capacity of observed tax (or transfer) policies. The technique is based on income distribution simulations and controls for differences in pre-tax income distributions. It assumes that the only information on the...

Addressing the poverty and distributional impacts of carbon pricing reforms is critical for the success of ambitious actions in the fight against climate change. This paper uses a simple framework to systematically review the channels through which carbon pricing can potentially affect poverty...