Analyzing unique data on loan applications by individuals who are majority owners of small firms, we detail how a bank's credit decisions affect their future income. We use the bank's cutoff rule, which is based on the applicants' credit scores, as the discontinuous locus providing exogenous...

Productivity and socio-economic progress are inter-connected. Economic growth funds policies that promote socio-economic progress, while the latter serves as a growth engine. A society with high mobility is one where individual achievements are influenced less by the individual’s parents and...

The deterioration of income inequality is frequently to be found among the suggested negative side-effects of globalization – ‘the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer'. How relevant is this perception? In my opinion, the question can be properly answered only after:1) a careful overview...

This paper investigates the effect of economic size and uncertainty on income inequality in Nigeria from 1980 to 2020. Using the ARDL methodology, and controlling for structural breaks, we investigate how economic size and uncertainty influence income inequality in Nigeria while controlling for...

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

Davies et al. (2008, 2011) provided the first estimates of the global distribution of wealth, using 2000 as the benchmark year. These estimates have been revised and updated since 2010, and the purpose of this paper is to explain the ways in which the estimation methodology has evolved and...

The transitional economies of Eastern Europe (EE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) experienced a dramatic increase in income inequality in the 1990s. In this paper I investigate the causes of unprecedented changes in income distribution using a unique panel of inequality estimates for 24...

In this paper, we estimate the recent evolution of global interpersonal inequality and examine the effect of omitted top incomes on the level and direction of global inequality. We propose a methodology to estimate the truncation point of household surveys by combining information on income...

This paper aims to quantify the effects from migration on net income distributions, disentangling the roles played by factor reallocation and remittances, and focusing on two (primarily) destination countries (Spain and Italy) and two (primarily) origin countries (Jordan and Iraq). Using LIS-ERF...

This introductory chapter provides background to and summarizes key findings from the chapters in this book, all of which share in common their use of household data from the latest round of the China Household Income Project (CHIP) survey to analyze recent trends in inequality in China. We...