Marriage is one of the most important determinants of economic prosperity, yet most existing theories of inequality ignore the role of the family. This paper documents that the cross-sectional distributions of earnings and wealth display a high degree of concentration, even when disaggregated...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues...

In this paper we attempted to chart the impact of the early part of Ireland’s economic crisis from 2008-2009 on the distribution of income. In order to decompose the impact of changes in different income components, we utilised a microsimulation methodology and the EU-SILC User Database. This...