Much of the recent interest in the relationship between growth and distribution has focused on advanced economies and neglected issues of development and structural transformation. The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to this gap by arguing that, even in the short-run, some of the...

In his 2014 book, Thomas Piketty argues that wealth inequality is sharply increasing in r-g and refers to rg as ‘the central contradiction of capitalist economics', where r is asset returns and g is real income growth. To assess whether inequality is increasing in the (r-g)-gap this paper: 1)...

We use a dynamic factor model to consider if real wage growth in the US, UK and Germany at different percentiles of the distribution can be explained by factors that are common across countries or specific to each country. Our results suggest that common factors explain a large proportion of the...