This study examines empirically the impact of income polarization on economic growth in an unbalanced panel of more than 70 countries during the 1960–2005 period. We calculate various polarization indices using existing micro-level datasets, as well as datasets reconstructed from grouped data...

Demographic disparities between the rates of occurrence of an adverse economic outcome can be observed to be increasing even as general social improvements supposedly lead towards the elimination of the adverse outcome in question. Scanlan (2006) noticed this tendency and developed a...

In the context of Social Welfare and Choquet integration, we briefly review, on the one hand, the generalized Gini welfare functions and inequality indices for populations of n=2 individuals, and on the other hand, the Mobius representation framework for Choquet integration, particularly in the...

We put together the different conceptual issues involved in measuring inequality of opportunity, discuss how these concepts have been translated into computable measures, and point out the problems and choices researchers face when implementing these measures. Our analysis identities and...

We propose a characterisation of an aggregate measure of growth that takes into account the initial economic conditions of individuals. Our measure is a weighted average of individual income growth with weights that are decreasing with the rank of the individual in the initial income...

This paper develops a criterion of opportunity equalization, that is consistent with theoretical views of equality of opportunity. Our analysis rests on the characterization of inequality of opportunity as a situation where some groups in society enjoy an illegitimate advantage. In this context,...

Extending the traditional income poverty concept by multidimensional poverty has been of growing interest within the last years. This paper contributes with an analysis of interdependent multidimensional (IMD) poverty intensity of time and income, which in particular restricts social...

This paper seeks to extend the unidimensional notion of Lorenz dominance to the multidimensional context. It formulates a definition of a multidimensional Lorenz dominance relation (MLDR) on the set of alternative distributions of well-being in an economy by incorporating generalizations of the...

We perform the first comprehensive fiscal incidence analyses in Brazil and the US, including direct cash and food transfers, targeted housing and heating subsidies, public spending on education and health, and personal income, payroll, corporate income, property, and expenditure taxes. In both...

Are macroeconomic factors such as income inequality the real root causes of financial crises? We explore a variety of financial and macroeconomic variables to find the most reliable predictors for financial crises in 14 developed countries over a period of more than 100 years. Our results, based...