Davide Furceri, Prakash Loungani, Jonathan D. Ostry and Pietro Pizzuto: Will Covid-19 affect inequality? Evidence from past pandemics, in: CEPR Press, Issue 12, Mai 1, 2020, p. 138-157.
This paper provides evidence on the impact of major epidemics from the past two decades on income distribution. The authors’ results justify the concern that the current pandemic could end up exerting a significant impact on inequality: past events of this kind, even though much smaller in scale, have led to increases in the Gini coefficient, raised the income shares of higher income deciles, and lowered the employment-to-population ratio for those with basic education compared to those with higher education. The authors provide some evidence that the distributional consequences from the current pandemic may be larger than those flowing from the historical pandemics in their sample.