Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration rates as well as community correctional populations have increased greatly since the mid-1970s. Both of these developments have disproportionately impacted poor and minority...

Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration rates as well as community correctional populations have increased greatly since the mid-1970s. Both of these developments have disproportionately impacted poor and minority...

This paper examines how the level and dispersion of self-reported happiness has evolved over the period 1972-2006. While there has been no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s. There have been large changes in the level of happiness...

This paper analyzes the effect of changes in structural progressivity of national income tax systems on observed and actual income inequality. Using several unique measures of progressivity over the 1981-2005 period for a large panel of countries, we find that progressivity reduces inequality in...

This paper proposes a measure of multidimensional inequality of opportunity - the Kullback Leibler divergence index, based on the opportunity equality definition of Roemer (1993, 1998, 2016). We prove theoretically and numerically that this measure satisfies a larger set of properties mainly the...

COVID-19 has been a tragedy for California. More than 4 million Californians have contracted the disease, and over 64,000 have died from it. And beyond the cost of illness and death, the pandemic and the state’s actions to contain it have devastated California’s economy. Low-income and...

There is an increasing literature that discusses how to measure the middle class. Some approaches are based on an arbitrary definition such as income quartiles or the poverty line. Recently, Foster and Wolfson developed a methodology which lacks of arbitrariness that enables us to compare the...

The paper investigates how comparisons of multivariate inequality can be made robust to varying the intensity of focus on the share of the population that are more relatively deprived. It follows the dominance approach to making inequality comparisons, as developed for instance by Atkinson...

Using two-step system-GMM on a panel data of 105 economies over the period 1987-2016, we present formal statistical evidence that Federalism is a strong predictor of greater income inequality in developing economies. It is also a strong predictor of higher poverty incidence and poverty severity...

The paper investigates how comparisons of multivariate inequality can be made robust to varying the intensity of focus on the share of the population that are more relatively deprived. It is in the spirit of Sen (1970)’s partial orderings and follows the dominance approach to making inequality...