This paper investigates empirically how similarity of demand structures – approximated by similarity of income distributions – affects trade patterns along both the extensive and intensive margin. The idea that similarity of demand structures intensifies trade goes back to the well-known Linder hypothesis. Based on a sample of 102 countries, I find that bilateral trade volumes are increasing in...

Multidimensional Affluence: Theory and Applications to Germany and the US This paper suggests multidimensional affluence measures for the top of the distribution. In contrast to commonly used top income shares, they allow the analysis of the extent, intensity and breadth of affluence in several dimensions within a common framework. We illustrate this by analyzing the role of income and wealth a...

Redistributive Preferences, Redistribution, and Inequality: Evidence from a Panel of OECD Countries This paper describes individuals’ inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences in a panel of OECD countries, primarily focusing on the association between these subjective measures and the effective level of inequality and redistribution. Not surprisingly, the effe...

Th is paper explores the relationships between openness, poverty and inequality in Africa. Th e analysis begins with a review of social development on the continent since 1980, followed by a discussion of openness and a lengthy exploration of the patterns of trade and fi nance that link Africa to the rest of the world. Th e macroeconomic policy framework that guided African policymaking over th...

This paper studies the implications for the long-run world income distribution (WID) of two possible knowledge spillovers structures: appropriate technology and backward knowledge spillovers. In an appropriate technology framework, where total factor intensity is an index of the technological level of an economy, countries will grab useful knowledge only from their technological neighborhood, t...

THE CONNEXION BETWEEN OLD AND NEW APPROACHES TO FINANCIAL SATISFACTION by Bernard M.S.van Praag In this paper we compare the new satisfaction evaluation approach, developed in the nineties by Oswald ,Clark , Blanchflower and others with the older income evaluation (IEQ) approach, developed by Van Praag and Kapteyn in the seventies of the previous century. We find that both approaches yield stri...

We model high income earners as sellers of quality services in a competitive assignment framework. Sellers (high income earners) are differentiated by ability; buyers by their taste for the service. There is assortative matching of buyers and sellers. We show that conventional optimal tax formulas are modified both by a social concern for buyers and an altered mapping of the talent into the inc...

This paper proposes a microeconomic decomposition of the evolution of income inequality in Côte d’Ivoire in the 1990s, allowing the in-depth analysis of simultaneous contributions of four types of phenomena to the evolution of the distribution of income: a change in the remuneration rates of observed and unobserved earnings determinants, a change in occupational preferences, and a change in the...

Multidimensional Measurement of Richness: Theory and an Application to Germany Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify individuals, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. We use this framework to analyze ...

We simulate the short- and long-term distributional consequences of COVID-19 in four largest Latin American economies: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico. show that short-term impact on income inequality poverty can be very significant, but additional spending social assistance more than offsets effect Brazil. The offsetting is significant Argentina Colombia nil Mexico, where there has been no...