Evidence on the portfolio holdings and transaction patterns of households suggests that the burden of inflation is not evenly distributed. We build a monetary growth model consistent with key features of cross- sectional household data and use this framework to study the distributional impact of...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. Applying inequality indices and Fields’ (2001) decomposition methodology to Bolivian household survey data of the years 1989 to 1997, we identify recent trends...

This article contributes to a clear understanding of important aspects of economic globalization. Specifically, we want to highlight the distributional concerns and how these are related to efficiency aspects of globalization. To this end, we identify relevant scenarios within a simple model of...

In recent decades, many countries experienced both a rise in top income shares and an increase of income inequality among the top earners. In this paper, I study the role of international trade as a catalyst for this development and analyze the associated welfare effects. I build a simple...

We develop a generalized approach to the treatment of household inequality aspects of social welfare in general equilibrium models of trade. We follow a dual approach, highlighting how general equilibrium distributional aspects of social welfare related to import protection may be examined...