The purpose of this essay is to outline the evolution of inequality in the post-World War II period and the causes shaping that evolution.  The starting proposition of the essay is that both inequality and the social tolerance of inequality have substantially increased almost everywhere over...

The Poverty Wars started with a coordinated series of skirmishes by the Centre for Independent Studies. One of their main criticism of income-based measures of poverty is that measurement error(i.e. under-reporting) is pronounced for low income earners, especially those who indicate they have an...

This paper is an attempt to find the main determinants of migrants’ earnings and analyze what makes migrants remit money to their home countries. We use the dataset on migrants compiled by the Riinvest Institute2 in 2006. Ordinary least squares (OLS) and interval regression methods are used to...

Standard explanations for the income heterogeneity within neighborhoods rely on differences of preferences across households and heterogeneity of the housing stock. We propose an alternative and complementary explanation. We construct a stochastic equilibrium sorting model where (1) income is...

Acknowledging individuals' distaste for low relative income renders trade less appealing when trade is viewed as a technology that integrates economies by merging separate social spheres into one. We define a "trembling trade" as a situation in which gains from trade are overtaken by losses of...

Acknowledging individuals’ distaste for low relative income renders trade less appealing when trade is viewed as a technology that integrates economies by merging separate social spheres into one. We define a “trembling trade” as a situation in which gains from trade are overtaken by...

This paper reviews the theory and application of decomposition techniques in the context of spatial inequality. It establishes some new theoretical results with potentially wide applicability, and examines empirical evidence drawn from a large number of countries.

This paper analyses regional data on inequality and poverty in Russia during 1994-2000 using published series from the regionally representative Household Budget Survey. The paper finds that the share of inequality in Russia coming from the between-regions component is large (close to a third of...

This paper applies a new decomposition technique to the study of variations in poverty across the regions of Russia. The procedure, which is based on the Shapley value in cooperative game theory, allows the deviation in regional poverty levels from the all- Russia average to be attributed to...

Acknowledging that individuals dislike having low relative income renders trade less attractive when seen as a technology that integrates two economies by merging separate social spheres into one. We define a 'trembling trade' as a situation in which gains from trade are less than losses in...