The Journal of Economic Inequality invites you to enjoy free access to this special collection on the Sustainable Development Goals and the study of economic inequality.

Is the current COVID-19 pandemic increasing or decreasing economic inequality? Are more equal societies more resilient to large health shocks? How steep is the social gradient of the COVID-19 impact? What is the distributional impact of the social distancing measures? What will be the long run impact on markets, policies, and institutions? Are existing social insurance mechanisms responding efficiently? How to evaluate the joint effect of the pandemic on the health and income distribution?

The Journal of Economic Inequality solicits submissions for a special issue on “Pandemics and economic inequality” to publish research that addresses these and related questions.

Finding the Upper Tail:

Empirical Strategies and Methods for the Top of the Distribution

One of the challenges in inequality measurement concerns measurement at the top of the distribution when it is imperfectly observed in the data. Household surveys usually do not capture the top very well because of sampling-design, data-collection and data-preparation problems. Upper-tail issues matter for inequality measurement and thus also for the ability to properly assess the role of fiscal policy for distributional outcomes.

Recent years have witnessed a variety of proposed approaches aimed at addressing problems of the upper tail. Some rely entirely on information about surveyed incomes (consumption or wealth) and some use additional information from tax records, National Accounts, rich lists and other sources to replace, complement or correct surveys. Other approaches instead focus on method enhancement, which involves the use of weighting schemes or parametric approximations.

The Journal of Economic Inequality is soliciting submissions for a special issue, “Finding the Upper Tail”, aimed at publishing research that specifically addresses these and related questions. The objectives of this issue are to provide outstanding examples of existing approaches, to compare advantages and limitations of alternative methodologies, and to share expert views on what should be done in light of the uncertainties implied by the approaches proposed in the literature.

Read recently published open access articles in The Journal of Economic Inequality.