This article traces inequality and numeracy development in the regions of Chile during the 19th and early 20th century. Inequality, measured with anthropometric methods, was associated with a lower speed of human capital formation. Not all talents received the necessary education to make full...

We study the effect of international trade and freeness of trade (openness) on interregional inequality within countries. We estimate a model derived from a structural economic-geography approach in which interregional inequality depends on weighted trade shares and trade costs. In addition to...

This paper analyzes the relationship between spatial mobility and social mobility. It develops a two-skill-type spatial equilibrium model of two regions with location preferences where each region consists of an urban area which is home to workplaces and residences and an exclusively residential...

We study whether the spatial distribution of natural resources across different ethnic groups within countries impede spatial inequality, national economic performance, and the incidence of armed conflict. By providing a theoretical rent-seeking model and analysing a set of geocoded data for...

We trace the rise of the so called oligarchs in post-Soviet Russia and examine their relationship to income distribution in Russia. When Russia moved to a market economy in the 1990s a new business elite evolved. Russia's distinctive path towards market economy, among other factors, gave rise to...

We study the dynamics of the quantity and quality of teachers in the framework of dynamic general equilibrium OLG model. The quantity and quality are jointly set by a government agency wishing to maximize the quality of basic education per student while being bound by teachers’ collective...

This paper develops a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980. Under realistic assumptions, we find that all agents can benefit from the...

Using microdata from the 1994-8 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) for nine countries, we examine the role of cognitive skills in explaining higher wage inequality in the United States. We find that while the greater dispersion of cognitive test scores in the United States plays a part...

This paper investigates whether and to what extent long-run trends in population health affected income inequality in the United States over the period 1960-2000. To isolate exogenous variation in health over time, the analysis exploits the sharp decline in cardiovascular disease mortality...