The Accession to the European Monetary Union and its Effects on Income Inequality: A Counterfactual Analysis

This dataset accompanies the paper "The Accession to the European Monetary Union and its Effects on Income Inequality: A Counterfactual Analysis" by Serrasqueiro, Sochirca, and Cunha Neves. It contains annual country-level data from 1985 to 2019 used to construct synthetic controls for the eleven EMU founding members, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain, with a donor pool drawn from OECD countries that did not join the monetary union. The outcome variables cover pre- and post-tax inequality measures, including Gini indices and income shares (top 1%, next 9%, middle 40%, bottom 50%), compiled from the World Inequality Database. The predictor set includes macroeconomic, fiscal, labour market, and openness variables (such as inflation, unemployment, government consumption, top marginal tax rates, trade openness, financial development, labour shares, and educational attainment) drawn from OECD, World Bank, and related international sources. A full list of variables, definitions, and original sources is provided in the accompanying documentation. The data are released to support reproduction and extension of the synthetic control estimates reported in the paper.