The aim of this paper is to provide comprehensive empirical evidence on recent theories that link democracy and income inequality for the period 1960-1997. In simple cross-country regressions I find a non-monotonic link between democracy and inequality when using ordinary least squares,...

This paper explores the link between compulsory voting and income distribution using a cross-section of countries around the world. Our empirical cross-country analysis for 91 countries during the period 1960-2000 shows that when compulsory voting can be strongly enforced the distribution of...

This paper uses a large cross-country survey of business firms to assess their influence on government policies. When controlling for endogeneity, we find that such an influence is associated with larger firms and to a lesser extent with government ownership, but not with the degree of...