Using social tables, we make an estimate of global inequality (inequality among world citizens) in early 19th century. We then show that the level and composition of global inequality have changed over the last two centuries. The level has increased reaching a high plateau around 1950s, and the...

This paper compares changes in relative and absolute wealth concentrations to establish if both processes have followed similar trajectories. The findings indicate that while the level of relative wealth concentration has increased recently, it is not extraordinarily high in an historical...

This research exploits novel evidence on current and historical inequality dynamics, as well as an instrumental variable (IV) strategy (founded on historical settler mortality à la Acemoglu et al.), to document the fundamental role of income redistribution through taxes and transfers in...

This paper investigates whether the size of the shadow economy increases income inequality in Uganda. This paper applies the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration, to test the long- and short-run relationship between the shadow economy and income...

This review covers a range of measures and methods frequently employed in empirical analysis of global income inequality and global income distribution. Different determinant factors along with quantification of their impacts and empirical results from different case studies are presented. These...

This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency,...

This paper investigates how government ideology and globalization are associated with top income shares in 17 OECD countries over the period 1970 to 2014. We use top income shares of the World Wealth and Income Database (WID). Globalization is measured by the KOF index of globalization. Static...

This paper studies determinants of income inequality using a newly assembled panel of 16 countries over the entire twentieth century. We focus on three groups of income earners: The rich (P99-100), the upper middle class (P90-99), and the rest of the population (P0-90). The results show that...

The billionaires of the world attract significant attention from the media and the public. Surprisingly, only a limited number of studies have explored empirically the determinants of extraordinary wealth. Using a large dataset we investigate whether globalization and corruption affect extreme...

Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey...