We study the evolution of an educational system which is founded on a hierarchical differentiation between technical and general education, with a superior social status attached to general. The resulting dynamic political equilibrium is best summarized by the ratio of vocational to general...

Even relatively poor people oppose high rates of redistribution because of the anticipation that they, or their children, may move up the income ladder. This ‘Prospect of Upward Mobility’ (POUM) hypothesis is commonly advanced to explain why democracies do not engage in large-scale...

Models of inequity aversion and fairness have dominated the behavioural economics landscape in the last decade. This study gathers data from 240 subjects exposed to variants of two of the major experimental games - dictator and trust - that are employed to provide important empirical content to...

The paper aims at studying determinants of schooling in traditional hierarchical societies confronted with an established history of outmigration. In the village, a ruling caste controls local political and religious institutions. For children who do not belong to the ruling caste, migration is...

Empirical studies of intergenerational social mobility have found that women are more mobile than men. To explain this finding, we describe a model of multi-trait matching and inheritance, in which individuals’ attractiveness in the marriage market depends on their market and non-market...

International surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate. At the same time, social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate...

We investigate redistributive taxation in a political economy experiment and determine how different patterns of social mobility affect the choices of redistributional taxes. In the absence of social mobility, voters choose tax rates that are very well in line with the prediction derived in the...

The poor favour redistribution and the rich oppose it, but that is not all. Social mobility may make some of today’s poor into tomorrow’s rich and since redistributive policies do not change often, individual preferences for redistribution should depend on the extent and the nature of social...

We propose a dynastic model in which individuals are born in an educated or uneducated environment that they inherit from their parents. We study the role of social networks on the correlation in the parent-child educational status independent of any parent-child interaction. We show that the...

Within the context of the neoclassical growth model I investigate the implications of (initial) endowment inequality when the rich have a higher marginal savings rate than the poor. More unequal societies grow faster in the transition process, and therefore exhibit a higher speed of convergence....