Normative-based distributional comparisons across countries and over time usually build upon the assumption that individuals are selfish. However, there is a consolidated evidence that individuals also care about what others have. In this paper we propose a framework for comparing and ranking...

The paper argues that household budgets are the best starting point for investigating a number of big questions related to the evolution of the living standards during the last two-three centuries. If one knows where to look, historical family budgets are more abundant than might be suspected....

I explore the relationship between the distribution of adult heights and the distribution of income. It has previously been argued (a) that average adult height may depend negatively on income inequality; (b) that some measure of inequality in adult heights is informative about inequality in...

Normative-based distributional comparisons across countries and over time usually build upon the assumption that individuals are selfish. However, there is a consolidated evidence that individuals also care about what others have. In this paper we propose a framework for comparing and ranking...

We argue that inter-country comparisons of income poverty based on poverty lines uniformly reflecting the costs of the basic requirements of human beings are superior to the existing money-metric approaches. In this exercise, we implement a uniform approach to poverty assessment based on basic...

Poor persons in poor countries are greatly exposed to the risk of adverse shocks, many of international origin, which can create long-lasting damage to individual well-being. There is a strong moral and prudential case for taking measures which reduce the extent to which such shocks arise and...

The hypothesis is that Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency have an aspect of sustainability in relation to inequality. The analysis finds efficient situations reached increasing inequality as diminishing in the long term effective demand in a larger measure than counterbalancing increases thanks...

This paper studies the impact of access to electricity via solar-powered home systems (SHSs) in rural communities in Peru. Applying propensity score matching at the community as well as at the household level, the authors find that households with SHSs spend less on traditional sources of...

The paper uses microeconomic data to characterize entrepreneurs by income group and selected household, individual and business characteristics, finding that entrepreneurship is rare but more frequent in the upper class than the middle or lower classes. Middle-class entrepreneurs are, on...