Recovering Within-Country Inequality from Trade Data

Hillrichs, Dorothee;Vannoorenberghe, Gonzague
(2026) Journal of the European Economic Association — (2026)

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Abstract
This paper develops a novel method to estimate inequality within a country based on what the country imports. If preferences are non-homothetic, rich and poor individuals of a country have different consumption profiles. Imports can thus inform about the income distribution in a country. The global availability of trade data allows us to estimate inequality using a single transparent and comparable method for a large sample of countries over time. Compared to conventional data, we feature an especially good coverage of developing countries. We provide a number of robustness checks and cross-validation exercises that show the good performance of our method.
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Hillrichs, D., & Vannoorenberghe, G. (2026). Recovering Within-Country Inequality from Trade Data. Journal of the European Economic Association. Accepted/in-press. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvag037 (Original work published 2026)