Using a panel fixed effects model for a sample of 121 countries covering 1975-2005, we examine how financial development, financial liberalization and banking crises are related to income inequality. In contrast with most previous work, our results suggest that all finance variables increase...

Does the distribution of income within a country become more equal as it grows richer? This paper uses plausibly exogenous variations in trade-weighted world income and international oil price shocks as instruments for within-country variations in countries' real GDP per capita to examine this...

The empirical work in Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century is simply breathtaking, but his use of the terms capital and marketable wealth interchangeably leads us to consider the implications of distinguishing between them, and calls our attention to important issues that deserve...

This paper reviews the evidence on how households in Sub-Saharan Africa segment along consumption, income and earning dimensions relevant for quantitative macroeconomic policy models which incorporate heterogeneity. Key findings include the importance of home-grown food in the income and...

This study analyzes the relationship among financial development, economic growth, and income inequality using cross-country panel VAR models. Most theoretical models state that these variables interact with one another and generate feedback dynamics. Under the presence of such interactive...

Are efficiency considerations important for understanding differences in the development of institutions? We model institutional quality as the degree to which obligations associated with exchanging capital can be enforced. Establishing a positive level of enforcement requires an aggregate...

This study proposes the mode-based decomposition approach to better examine the change of the more impoverished population's wealth into growth and distribution effects. Given Gibrat’s law, the decomposition first approximates the income distribution to lognormal distribution using the maximum...

Not anytime soon. Using a novel dataset covering 127 countries and spanning two centuries, we find evidence for an energy Kuznets curve, with an initial decline of energy demand at low levels of per capita income followed by stages of acceleration and then saturation at high-income levels....

Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the non-college educated. Additionally, positive assortative mating has risen. Income inequality among households has also widened. A...

This paper assesses how pro-poor and inclusive Asia's recent growth has been, and what factors have been driving these outcomes. It finds that while poverty has fallen across the region over the last two decades, inequality has increased, dampening the impact of growth on poverty reduction. As a...