Measuring income inequality and the impact of the welfare state during COVID-19: Evidence from bank data. 22/09/2020
Aspachs, Oriol ; Durante, Ruben ; Garciá-Montalvo, José ; Graziano, Alberto ; Mestres, Josep ; Reynal-Querol, Marta
2020
epidemic disease ; social inequality ; income distribution ; welfare state
Income distribution
https://voxeu.org/article/income-inequality-and-welfare-state-during-covid-19
English
Bibliogr.
"The economic crisis from the COVID-19 pandemic may disproportionately affect the most vulnerable segments of the population, creating serious challenges for social cohesion and political stability. This column constructs a high-frequency measure of income inequality using anonymised data from bank records on the wages and public transfers of over three million account holders in Spain. Wage inequality increased by almost 30% during the COVID-19 crisis, mainly due to job losses and wage cuts for low-income workers. However, public transfers were very effective at offsetting most, though not all, of this increase.
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Digital
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