Replaced with revised version of paper Jan. 11, 2012

The income inequality implications of land reform are examined for the case of Georgia using regression-based inequality decomposition techniques. An egalitarian land redistribution is likely to equalize per-capita income among farm households, implying that continuing the land reform process in...

Democracy tends to cultivate short-sighted politicians, for whom the horizon extends more or less till next election. This feature gives rise to a discrepancy between the time rate of discount of a country’s polity and the interest rates at which the country borrows. I show how this...

In Israel, rural communities are those with up to 2000 residents, and rural areas include only rural communities. This paper explores the dependence of rural incomes on nearby urban areas. This dependence is mostly implied by rural-to-urban or urban-to-rural selective migration (or both)....

This paper explores the relationship between income distribution, prices, production efficiency and aggregate output in a decentralized search economy. We show that income distribution determines how competitive the market is, and thereby affects production efficiency and aggregate output. It is...

farm size inequality is a natural outcome of farm specialization and the advantages of scale economies for more successful farmers, but it could weaken the common interests among farmers and thus their political power. This is especially true for farms that are organized in cooperatives, such as...

Prior to 1996, Israelis in collective communities (kibbutzim) shared the costs of raising children equally. This paper examines the impact of privatizing costs of children on the behavior of young couples using universal microdata on kibbutz members. Exploiting variation in the increase in cost...