Benefit incidence analysis is an extremely popular tool to assess the distribution of benefits from government expenditure in developing countries, particularly in the social sectors. The analysis describes the welfare impact of public spending on groups of people or households, typically along...

This paper analyzes long-term trends in intergenerational earnings persistence in France for male cohorts born between 1931 and 1975. This time period has witnessed important changes in the French labor market and educational system, in particular an important compression of earnings...

This paper reports information on income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean computed from a sample of more than 50 household surveys from 20 LAC countries from 1989 to 2001. Although the core of the statistics is on household income inequality, we also report results on aggregate...

This report describes the socio-economic situation in Chile based on a large set of distributional, labor and social statistics computed from microdata of the Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional (CASEN) from 1990 to 2000. The report also draws from other data sources and the...

This paper examines the argument for public provision of certain private goods, like education and health, based on equality of opportunity by studying the utility possibility frontier of a society in which there is a concern for the distribution of these goods. A given quality of education or...

This document is the first of a series of reports on the socio-economic situation in Uruguay. It is mainly based on a wide range of distributional, labor and social statistics computed from microdata collected by the Encuesta Continua de Hogares (ECH) from 1989 to 2003. Data has also been drawn...

We use recent unconditional quantile regression methods (UQR) to study the distributive effects of education in Argentina. Standard methods usually focus on mean effects, or explore distributive effects by either making stringent modeling assumptions, and/or through counterfactual decompositions...

The United States and China are the world's largest economies. Together they are responsible for about one-third of the world's economic output. This paper aims to examine whether the two economic giants are also lands of opportunity where resources are allocated in a way that minimizes...

We provide a concise introduction to a household-panel data infrastructure that provides the international research community with longitudinal data of private households in Germany since 1984: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We demonstrate the comparative strength of the SOEP data in...

This paper estimates the extent of intergenerational income mobility in Japan among sons and daughters born between 1935 and 1975. Our estimates rely on a two-sample instrumental variables approach using representative data from the Japanese Social Stratification and Mobility (SSM) surveys,...