In order to have the public funds necessary for its development, Niger is examining the possibility of expanding its VAT tax base to exempted goods and basic food products. This proposal has prompted violent opposition leading to the question of the social impacts of taxation. The first...

This paper develops methods for evaluating distributional impacts of alternative environmental policies across demographic groups. The income inequality literature provides a natural methodological toolbox for comparing distributions of environmental outcomes. We show that the most commonly used...

Fiscal policy measures are a key means by which governments can influence distribution and poverty, but in fact the relationships between fiscal policy and poverty are not well understood. The most commonly used technique for assessing the distributional impact, benefit incidence analysis, is...

In this paper we evaluate the gender wage gap component due to differences in characteristics’ rewards in Italy. The main focus is on the relationship between human capital characteristics and gender differences in rewards. We propose a methodology that combines the quantile regression...

The spatial patterns of changes in economic diversion and convergence have become more blurred in the last decades. International disparities between nations have diminished. At the same time intra-national disparities have increased in most European countries. In the search to identify the...

Abstract This paper proposes two methods for estimating panel data models with group specific parameters when group membership is not known. The first method uses the individual level time series estimates of the parameters to form threshold variables. The problem of parameter heterogeneity is...

This paper documents the convergence of incomes across Indian states over the period 1965 to 1998. It departs from traditional analyses of convergence by tracking the evolution of the entire income distribution, instead of standard regression and time series analyses. The findings reveal...

This paper documents the convergence of incomes across Indian states over the period 1965 to 1998. It departs from traditional analyses of convergence by tracking the evolution of the entire income distribution, instead of standard regression and time series analyses. The findings reveal...

I model life expectancy in terms of physical and human capital and technology, the fundamental economic variables described by economic growth theories. For concreteness, the Solow model and a convergence club growth model by Howitt and Mayer (2001) are used as examples. I discuss how a multiple...