The effects of inflation and openness on inequality across alternative monetary regimes

This article provides the first empirical evidence by employing an endogenous switching regression model to investigate whether the adoption of inflation targeting (IT) alters the relationships between inflation and inequality as well as between openness and inequality. Using a large panel of countries over the 1980-2010 period, we find that policies aiming at stabilizing prices and opening to trade will benefit more from the reduction of income inequality, and the inequality-reducing effects are more pronounced in the IT countries. As a by-product, we find that the inverted-U relationship between inequality and development, that is, the Kuznets' hypothesis, holds only in the Non-IT countries, not in the IT economies. The findings are unlikely to be driven by the presence of outliers, the use of estimators and the assumptions of errors distribution.