Ethnic heterogeneity can potentially be related to the occurrence of conflicts with longlasting economic effects. Two main measures of ethnic heterogeneity are employed in the econometric literature on ethnic diversity and conflict: the Gini heterogeneity or fractionalization index and the...

In the present paper we study the distributive impact of institutional change in developing countries. In such economies, economic institutions, such as property rights systems, may act to preserve the interests of a rich minority, but this depends crucially on the level of political equality....

Skaperdas (1996) characterized the contest success function (CSF), which stipulates the winning probabilities of the contestants, using respectively the scale invariance and translation invariance axioms. This paper first characterizes the entire family of CSFs that fulfils a convex mixture of...

We test with a randomized experiment in the slums of Nairobi whether violence suffered during the 2007 political outbreaks affects trustworthiness learning when participants live group experiences and face opportunism and free riding in public good games (PGGs) between two subsequent trust games...

This paper proposes an explanation for the decrease in social mobility that has occurred in the last two decades in a number of advanced economies, as well as for the divergence in mobility dynamics across countries. Within an intergenerational framework, we show that a two-tier higher education...

This paper argues that public holidays facilitate the co-ordination of leisure time but do not constrain the annual amount of leisure. Public holidays therefore have benefits both in the utility of leisure on holidays and (by enabling people to maintain social contacts more easily) in increasing...

Theoretical and empirical studies exploring the effects of income inequality upon growth reach a disappointing inconclusive result. This paper postulates that one reason for this ambiguity is that income inequality is actually a composite measure of at least two different sorts of inequality:...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and adopt a generalised version of Roemer's (1998) Equality of Opportunity (EOp) framework, which we call extended EOp, for analysing second-best optimal income taxation. Unlike the pure EOp criterion of Roemer (1998) the extended EOp criterion allows...

Most of the data available for measuring capabilities or dimensions of poverty is either ordinal or categorical. However, the majority of the indices introduced for the assessment of multidimensional poverty behave well only with cardinal variables. The counting approach introduced by Atkinson...

In the context of the binomial decomposition of OWA functions, we investigate the parametric constraints associated with the 3-additive case in n dimensions. The resulting feasible region in two coefficients is a convex polygon with n vertices and n edges, and is strictly increasing in the...