{"title":"Monetary policy shocks and their effects across the wealth distribution: evidence from new European data","authors":"Simone Cima, Marco Moreno-Ibarra","doi":"10.1007/s10888-025-09687-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-025-09687-4","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We use new data on the distribution of wealth in the euro area and employ panel local projections to estimate the different impact of ECB monetary policy shocks on households across the wealth distribution. We look at how policy affects the value of their assets, the composition of their balance sheets, their investment decisions, and overall wealth inequality. We find that in response to a contractionary shock, poorer households display a substantial decline in their assets and in their overall net wealth. Conversely, the overall wealth of the very richest is not significantly affected. This different response leads to a moderate increase in overall wealth inequality. We further perform a decomposition of asset movements caused by the shock, isolating the effect of revaluations and of household investment. We observe that the response of household wealth due to a monetary policy shock occurs primarily through revaluation effects.","PeriodicalId":284513,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Economic Inequality","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10888-025-09687-4.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147921771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the effectiveness of quasi-universal transfers to older households: the case of Poland","authors":"Aleksandra Kolasa","doi":"10.1007/s10888-024-09626-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-024-09626-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":284513,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Economic Inequality","volume":" 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141369474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chris Clarke, Julien Bonnet, Manuel Flores, Olivier Thévenon
{"title":"What are the economic costs of childhood socio-economic disadvantage? Evidence from a pathway analysis for 27 European countries","authors":"Chris Clarke, Julien Bonnet, Manuel Flores, Olivier Thévenon","doi":"10.1007/s10888-023-09603-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09603-8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":284513,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Economic Inequality","volume":"28 18","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138948242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gustavo A. Marrero, Juan C. Palomino, Gabriela Sicilia
{"title":"Inequality of opportunity in educational achievement in Western Europe: contributors and channels","authors":"Gustavo A. Marrero, Juan C. Palomino, Gabriela Sicilia","doi":"10.1007/s10888-023-09595-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09595-5","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We study the contribution of students’ circumstances to inequality of opportunity in educational achievement (IOpE) in Western Europe and explore the role of intermediate channelling variables in translating differences in circumstances into educational inequalities. Using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) database, we find that differences in households’ cultural environment and in parental occupation are the most important contributing circumstances, with school’s circumstances being relevant mostly in Central Europe. Our results show that the relevant channels of IOpE in most countries are students’ educational and occupational expectations, their reading habits and skills, and grade repetition in previous years. These findings can provide policymakers with key insights to aid in designing educational interventions that effectively increase educational opportunities across European countries.","PeriodicalId":284513,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Economic Inequality","volume":"9 7","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136346331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the social welfare interpretation of growth incidence curves","authors":"Yonatan Berman, François Bourguignon","doi":"10.1007/s10888-023-09598-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09598-2","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Growth Incidence Curve (GIC), introduced in the poverty measurement literature by Ravallion and Chen (Econ. Lett. 78 (1), 93–99, 2003), proved to be a valuable and widely used tool to analyze the impact of growth on poverty and its ‘pro-poorness’. Beyond pro-poorness, however, the relationship between the shape of GICs and social welfare is ambiguous. If a declining GIC, together with a positive overall rate of growth, is unambiguously associated with a social welfare gain, such a shape is not the most common and the reciprocal is not necessarily true. This paper analyzes the social welfare properties of GICs, as well as their non-anonymous counterpart (NAGICs), which describe how income growth depends on the initial rank of individuals in the initial income distribution. NAGICs thus account not only for the change in the distribution of income but also for income mobility, and differ conceptually from their anonymous counterpart. However, their social welfare interpretation proves to be very similar.","PeriodicalId":284513,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Economic Inequality","volume":"49 22","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136348318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Measuring income inequality in social networks","authors":"Oded Stark, Jakub Bielawski, Fryderyk Falniowski","doi":"10.1007/s10888-023-09589-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09589-3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We present a new index for measuring income inequality in networks. The index is based on income comparisons made by the members of a network who are linked with each other by direct social connections. To model the comparisons, we compose a measure of relative deprivation for networks. We base our new index on this measure. The index takes the form of a ratio: the network’s aggregate level of relative deprivation divided by the aggregate level of the relative deprivation of a hypothetical network in which one member of the network receives all the income, and it is with this member that the other members of the network compare their incomes. We discuss the merits of this representation. We inquire how changes in the composition of a network affect the index. In addition, we show how the index accommodates specific network characteristics.","PeriodicalId":284513,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Economic Inequality","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135268374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The distributional impact of structural transformation in rural India: case-study evidence and model-based simulation","authors":"Chris Elbers, Peter Lanjouw","doi":"10.1007/s10888-023-09597-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09597-3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The North Indian village of Palanpur has been the subject of close study over a period of six decades from 1957/8 to 2015. Himanshu et al. (2018) document the evolution of the village economy over this period and point to two distinct drivers of growth and distribution of income. An early period of agricultural intensification associated with the green revolution saw an expansion of irrigation and the introduction of new agricultural technologies, leading to rising incomes accompanied by falling poverty and fairly stable, or even declining, income inequality. From about the mid-1970s onwards, a cumulative process of non-farm diversification took hold, and was associated with further growth and poverty decline but also a significant rise in income inequality. Such a process of structural transformation has been observed more widely in rural India. We construct a simple model of a village economy that captures several of the salient features of the Palanpur economy and society, and that is able to reproduce the distributional outcomes observed in the village. Our analysis suggests that while non-farm diversification occurred alongside rising inequality, the counterfactual of no diversification would in fact be associated with an even greater increase. We suggest therefore that non-farm diversification has in fact helped to contain growth in inequality, and has played a particularly pronounced role in reducing poverty. To the extent that other villages in India share features similar to Palanpur, our findings may also hold elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":284513,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Economic Inequality","volume":"42 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135510852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The impact of FDI income on income shares in home countries","authors":"Joseph P. Joyce","doi":"10.1007/s10888-023-09592-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09592-8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":284513,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Economic Inequality","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135617628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The global distribution of gains from globalization","authors":"Valentin Lang, Marina M. Tavares","doi":"10.1007/s10888-023-09593-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09593-7","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Global interpersonal inequality is increasingly driven by inequalities within countries while the role of inequality between countries diminishes. Is this due to globalization? To answer this question, we use comprehensive global panel data at the country-decile-group level for the past half century and exploit the geographic diffusion of liberalization policies to identify the effect of globalization. Across countries, we find that income gains are substantial for countries at early stages of the globalization process, but the ‘marginal returns to globalization’ diminish as globalization rises, eventually becoming insignificant for the most globalized countries. Within countries, gains from globalization are largest for the richest ten percent of national income distributions, resulting in substantial increases in national income inequalities. A simple quantitative model is consistent with these empirical results. Over the past half century, globalization has promoted a dual trend of income convergence across countries and income divergence within countries.","PeriodicalId":284513,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Economic Inequality","volume":"184 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136113491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}