Background: The link between poverty and poor health outcomes is well known; more recently there is some evidence that suggests an independent effect of income inequality on health. However this association of income inequality with health appears to be weaker at smaller spatial levels. The paper examines the question whether socioeconomic segregation at the neighbourhood level, which is the sp...

This study explores the consequences and origins of between-ethnicity economic inequality across countries. First, combining satellite images of nighttime luminosity with the historical homelands of ethnolinguistic groups we construct measures of ethnic inequality for a large sample of countries. We also compile proxies of overall spatial inequality and regional inequality across administrative...

We assess the merits of different education systems in a framework that accounts for the joint decision problem of parents regarding fertility and education. Specifically, we compare the implications of a public and a private schooling regime for economic growth and inequality. We find that private schooling leads to higher growth when there is little inequality in human capital endowments acro...

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 inequality indexes, such as the Atkinson index, have theoretical properties that make them inappropr...

This paper presents a framework for constructing and analyzing enclosures of the reachable set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) using continuous-time setpropagation methods. The focus is on convex enclosures that can be characterized in terms of their support functions. A generalized differential inequality is introduced, whose solutions describe such support functions for a ...

In this paper, we use census tract data to analyse changes in neighbourhood income inequality and residential economic segregation in the eight largest Canadian cities during the 1980-95 period. Is the income gap between richer and poorer neighbourhoods rising? Are high and low-income families increasingly clustered in economically homogeneous neighbourhoods? The main results are an elaboration...

We document a relationship between income inequality and variability in aggregate consumption growth. In high-income countries, greater income inequality is associated with more volatility in consumption growth, whereas in lower-income countries, higher levels of income inequality are associated with less volatility. We present weaker evidence that variability in real GDP growth is also related...

Using multiple data sources, we establish that China's income inequality since 2005 has reached very high levels, with the Gini coefficient in the range of 0.53-0.55. Analyzing comparable survey data collected in 2010 in China and the United States, we examine social determinants that help explain China's high income inequality. Our results indicate that a substantial part of China's high incom...

Morton Paglin recently proposed a new summary statistic~ the "Paglin-Gini," which he uses to measure an.d analyze the level and trend of income inequality in the United States. In contrast with the standard Lorenz-Gini, which counts all income differences among living units in measuring inequality, the Paglin-Gini defines meaningful inequality to include only the differences in family incomes t...