Wealthy parents influence their children’s wealth directly – such as through inheritances or gifts – and indirectly, through family and environmental factors. This column compares the wealth positions of parents in the Netherlands in 1992 and their children in 2022. Children with wealthier parents consistently attain higher wealth rankings compared to their peers, especially among […]
Preferential college admission is gaining traction worldwide as a means to address inequality in higher education, drawing greater attention to the design of such policies. This column analyses a programme for disadvantaged high schools in Chile that offers guaranteed college admission to top-performing students. The programme increased enrolment in selective colleges but reduced pre-college academic […]
The negative correlation between inequality and unionisation rates in the US has been extensively documented, but while the other direction of causality – the impact of inequality on the labour movement – has also been theorised, it has not been empirically tested. This column uses three distinct research settings to show how rising occupational wage […]
Productivity growth has been lacklustre over the past 20 years in most advanced economies. But standard productivity measures ignore the progress that some economies have made in terms of lowering carbon dioxide emissions. This column proposes a method to embed those efficiency gains into existing productivity measures. For traditional (small) estimates of the cost of […]
Decades of research have confirmed that job displacement causes significant and persistent earnings losses. This column presents new evidence from workers displaced during firm closures in West Germany between 2000 and 2005 which suggests that these losses are in fact much more heterogeneous than previously documented, and that the large average losses documented in previous […]
Internal balance-of-payment crises should be taken as a strong signal of weakness and a wake-up call to reform euro area structures The single currency was expected to make the balance of payments irrelevant between the euro-area member states. This benign view has been challenged by recent developments, especially as imbalances between euro-area central banks have […]
Earlier this year, the World Bank conducted the second round of a Data Sharing Exercise with G-7 and Paris Club creditors. This is the first large-scale effort of its kind to systematically compare creditor- and debtor-reported data at the loan-by-loan level. Since the release of the March 2025 report, the 2025 G-7 Finance Ministers’ Communiqué highlighted the exercise and […]
Knowledge, especially practical, hands-on know-how, is essential for countries to tackle development challenges and to build resilience to disasters and shocks. One of the most effective ways to share this “how-to” knowledge is through peer-to-peer exchanges among policy makers and practitioners. The challenge: Closing the disaster insurance gap When natural disasters strike, many people and […]
Following the US tariff announcements in early April, the US dollar strongly depreciated while US Treasury yields rose. This column zooms in on the April episode, analysing the co-movement of asset prices with an estimated market ‘safe-haven factor’. It shows that the co-movement of the US dollar with the ‘safe-haven factor’ changed in April, and […]
Over the past 30 years, laws in Italy have become longer, more convoluted, and frequently unintelligible even to seasoned legal professionals. This column exploits variation in the ability of lower courts to interpret poorly drafted laws in alignment with Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation to assess how legal uncertainty affects the local economy. The authors […]
