Major epidemics of the last two decades (SARS, H1N1, MERS, Ebola and Zika) have been followed by increases in inequality (Furceri, Loungani, Ostry and Pizzuto, 2020). In this paper, we show that the extent of fiscal consolidation in the years following the onset of these pandemics has played an...

As suggested by recent empirical evidence, one of the causes behind the widespread rise of inequality experienced by OECD countries in the last few decades may have been the increased flexibility of labor markets. The authors explore this hypothesis through the analysis of a stock-flow...

Using household data from 1988 to 2018, we confirm that the increase in income inequality in China has come to a halt in recent years but show that inequality in wealth and consumption continues to increase. We report a clear convergence of inequality across the different dimensions of income,...

Volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state. However, although the literature on volunteering is extensive, knowledge on how life’s discontinuities (life event shocks) affect volunteering is limited because most studies work with static (cross-sectional) data. To...

A growing body of research documents the importance of wealth and the racial wealth gap in perpetuating inequality across generations. We add to this literature by examining the impact of wealth on child income by race, while also extending our analysis to three generations. Our two stage least...

This paper looks at the links between inequality of opportunity and views about the underlying processes that support economic success or failure. Unlike income inequality, inequality of opportunity isolates the extent to which inequality in circumstances beyond an individual's control...

Using data on household balance sheets from the Survey of Consumer Finances and data on macroeconomic rates of return from Jordà et al. (2019) we construct two alternate series for household rates of return by race from 1989 to 2016. Our estimates suggest a persistent racial gap in the rate of...

Using data on household balance sheets from the Survey of Consumer Finances and data on macroeconomic rates of return from Jordà et al. (2019) we construct two alternative series for household rates of return by race from 1989 to 2016. Our estimates suggest a persistent racial gap in the rate...

In this paper, we propose a model of endogenous partial insurance and we investigate its implications for macroeconomic outcomes, such as wealth inequality, asset accumulation, interest rate, and consumption smoothing. To this end, we include participation costs to state-contingent asset markets...