This paper focuses on the role of minimum wages, tax and benefit policies in protecting workers against financial poverty, covering 21 European countries with a national minimum wage and three US States (New Jersey, Nebraska and Texas). It is shown that only for single persons and only in a...

This study provides ex-post evidence on the redistributive impact of the minimumwage on disposable household incomes in Germany. Although the reductionof income inequality and poverty were emphasized as policy goals of the of minimumwage introduction, the distributional literature for Germany...

We analyze the impact of the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) on employment outcomes of low-skilled Arizona workers, with a focus on the states' unauthorized population. The intent of LAWA was to limit unauthorized workers' economic opportunities as a way to deter further illegal...

The share of people living in extreme poverty fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015 but has continued to increase in many fragile and conflict-affected areas where half of the extreme poor are expected to reside by 2030. These areas are also where the least evidence exists on how to...

In this paper, we develop a multi-country open economy extension of the famous Big Push model for a closed economy by Murphy et al. (1989). We show under which conditions the global economy in our model is caught in a poverty trap, characterised by a low-income equilibrium from which an escape...

In industrial economies, firms build their market position by consistently investing in R&D over time and accumulating knowledge protected by secrecy, patents and other appropriability devices. To explore the macroeconomic implications of this fact, I construct an economy where oligopolistic...

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of income inequality in China from 1987 to 2002, employing three series of data sets. Our focus is on both urban and rural inequality, as well as the urban-rural gap, with the objective of summarizing several “first-order” empirical patterns...

The purpose of this paper is handling the informal sector in Egypt and the role it can play in accelerating the development process and poverty reduction. The structure of the paper starts with an introduction, and then gives a definition of development and its objectives in order to give a...

Standard models explain urbanization by rural-urban migration in response to an (expected) urban-rural wage gap. The Green Revolution and rural poverty constitute rural push factors of migration. The Indus- trial Revolution and the urban bias are urban pull factors. This paper offers an...