This paper joins in the debate on the size of the middle class in Latin America, providing an analysis of its structure and characteristics. Using several measurements, it finds that 40-60 percent of Latin American households are middle class, a share which has consolidated over the past decade....

This document presents a systematic review of empirical approaches to the identification and measurement of the middle class as the concept is used in the applied literature. It then presents an arguably less arbitrary definition of the middle class which is based on sound principles of...

This paper provides an analysis of the social consequences of people seeking to keep up with the Joneses. All individuals attempt to reach a higher rank than the Joneses, including the Joneses themselves. This attitude gives rise to an equilibrium in which all individuals have equal utilities...

Different concepts of inequality lead to different positions in discussions about whether economic growth leads to increasing inequality. This study investigates how over 1,100 young adults in Mozambique perceive inequality and whether their perceptions are based on relative or absolute terms....

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...

This paper shows that within-country happiness inequality has fallen in the majority of countries that have experienced positive income growth over the last forty years, in particular in developed countries. This new stylized fact comes as an addition to the Easterlin paradox, which states that...

Understanding the exact connection between inequality and justice is important because justice is classically regarded as the first line of defense against self-interest and inequality. Absent a strong and clear link between inequality and justice, the sense of justice would not awaken to exert...

In this paper, we propose to use the so-called Sen-Shorrocks poverty index (Shorrocks, 1995) to measure multidimensional deprivation when only dichotomous variables are available to assess deprivation in the various deprivation domains, the most common case in the literature, and introduce a...

Most existing empirical papers concerned about multidimensional poverty use the house- hold as the unit of analysis, meaning that multidimensional poverty status of the household is equated with the multidimensional poverty status of all individuals in the household. This assumption,...

Income inequality is on the rise, and everyone, from President Obama and Pope Francis to Prince Charles and Standard & Poor's, is talking about it. But these conversations about what are arguably the most significant changes in the distribution of incomes and earnings since the 1940s are leading...