Voter turnout is frequently cited as gauging a polity's health. The ease with which electoral members produce political support can, however, retard an economy's productive capacity. For example, while mobile electorates might efficaciously monitor political agents, they may also lack...

Voter turnout is frequently cited as gauging a polity's health. The ease with which electoral members produce political support can, however, retard an economy's productive capacity. For example, while mobile electorates might efficaciously monitor political agents, they may also lack...

Voter turnout is frequently cited as gauging a polity's health. The ease with which electoral members can produce political support, however, can retard an economy's productive capacity. For example, while mobile electorates might efficaciously monitor political agents, they may also lack...

This research develops a theory about the role of inequality in the overtaking of growth performance across countries. The theory captures two opposing effects of inequality on factor accumulation and suggests that the qualitative change in their combined effect is a prime cause of overtaking....

A mutual link between poverty and environmental degradation is examined in an overlapping generations model with environmental externality, human capital, and credit constraints. Environmental quality affects labor productivity and thus wealth dynamics, whereas wealth distribution determines the...

From 1989 to 2001, wealth in real terms increased overall among U.S. families. But characterizing distributional changes is much more complex; it depends on the specific questions asked. For example, there is evidence both from Forbes data on the 400 wealthiest Americans and from the SCF, which...

The large wealth and consumption inequality in the U.S. is usually attributed to two market frictions: debt constraints and incomplete markets. Recent literature has argued that debt constraints are the critical friction while market incompleteness plays only a secondary role. We evaluate the...

There are two phenomena widely observed when an economy departs from an underdeveloped state and starts rapid economic growth. One is the shift of production, employment, and consumption from the traditional sector to the modern sector, and the other is a large increase in educational levels of...

This paper investigates the quantitative importance of different savings motives on the distributions of wealth and consumption and aggregate capital accumulation by solving an overlapping generations model with intragenerational heterogeneity. Agents differ in age, ability, earnings shocks, and...

The objective of this work is to analyse the income inequality in the 15 EU countries during the convergence process to the Monetary Union. Using the information contained in the European Community Household Panel, corresponding to the four first waves. Using the inverse second order stochastic...