We axiomatically characterize two classes of poverty measures which are sensitive to inequality of opportunity - one a strict subset of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to differences in opportunities faced by people with...

The paper develops a concept and a measure of the monetary capacity of a country to reduce its own poverty and shows how these tools can be used to guide budget allocations or the distribution of Aid. We call this concept the income lever and define it as the relation between the welfare of the...

This paper provides a unique analysis of the evolution of gender and racial occupational segregation in Brazil from 1987-2006. Drawing on a novel dataset, constructed by harmonizing national household data over twenty years, the paper provides extensive new insights in the nature and evolution...

The present study calculates variable, cross-sectional as well as longitudinal equivalence scales on the basis of the German 1984-2010 Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) database for West Germany. It follows the "individual variant" for calculating subjective equivalence scales using "life...

The purpose of this Chartbook is to present a summary of evidence about long-run changes in economic inequality – primarily income, earnings, and wealth – for 25 countries covering more than one hundred years. There is a range of countries and they account for more than a third of the...

This paper proposes an explanation for the decrease in social mobility that has occurred in the last two decades in a number of advanced economies, as well as for the divergence in mobility dynamics across countries. Within an intergenerational framework, we show that a two-tier higher education...

The ``Palma'' is the ratio of national income shares of the top 10 percent of households to the bottom 40 percent, reflecting Gabriel Palma's observation of the stability of the ``middle'' 50 percent share of income across countries so that distribution is largely a question of the tails. In...

How much redistribution and poverty reduction is being accomplished in Latin America through social spending, subsidies, and taxes? Standard fiscal incidence analyses applied to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay using a comparable methodology yields the following results....

Inequality in Mexico rose between 1989 and 1994 and declined between 1994 and 2010. We examine the role of market forces (demand and supply of labour by skill), institutional factors (minimum wages and unionization rate), and public policy (cash transfers) in explaining changes in inequality. We...

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. We construct two new metadata...