The proposed income distribution effect of financial liberalization has gradually attracted the attention of academic economists, but the research results are inconsistent and even contradictory. This paper presents a quantitative review of these studies. The objectives are to assess the impact of financial liberalization on income inequality and to identify the sources of heterogeneity. A meta-analysis is performed with 23 empirical cross-country studies on the relationship between financial liberalization and income inequality, yielding a total of 556 estimates. We find overall support for the small negative relationship between financial liberalization and income inequality when considering potential publication bias and method heterogeneity. Our results suggest that different impact channels, institutional quality, the measurement used for financial liberalization and income inequality, and the use of different econometric methods are especially effective for explaining the differences in past study findings.

提出的金融自由化的收入分配效应已逐渐引起了学术经济学家的关注，但研究结果不一致甚至矛盾。本文对这些研究进行了定量回顾。目的是评估金融自由化对收入不平等的影响并确定异质性的根源。对23个关于金融自由化和收入不平等之间关系的经验性跨国研究进行了荟萃分析，总共得出556个估计。当考虑潜在的出版偏见和方法的异质性时，我们发现金融自由化和收入不平等之间的小的负面关系得到了总体支持。我们的结果表明，不同的影响渠道，机构质量，