Equality of opportunity is an important normative ideal that concerns politicians and the larger public alike. In spite of its wide acceptance, current estimation approaches in the literature suffer from severe data restrictions that lead to biased estimates of inequality of opportunity. These...

Empirical evidence on distributional preferences shows that people do not judge inequality as problematic per se but that they take the underlying sources of income differences into account. In contrast to this evidence, current measures of inequality do not adequately reflect these normative...

We propose a set of new methods to estimate inequality of opportunity based on conditional inference regression trees. In particular, we illustrate how these methods represent a substantial improvement over existing empirical approaches to measure in equality of opportunity. First, they minimize...

The advantages and disadvantages of public sector decentralization are widely discussed in economics and political science. While some authors argue that decentralization leads to an optimal provision of public services and a promotion of economic growth, others emphasize the dangers of...

I investigate how government ideology and globalization are associated with top income shares in 16 OECD countries over the period 1970 to 2010. I use the new World Top Incomes Database. Globalization is measured by the KOF index of globalization. The results show that the top 1% income share...

I examine the extent to which public sector outsourcing relates to public employment in OECD countries. I use new panel data on public sector outsourcing. The sample includes 26 countries over the period 2009-2015. Contrary to common expectations, the results do not suggest that public sector...

This paper investigates how government ideology and globalization are associated with top income shares in 17 OECD countries over the period 1970 to 2014. We use top income shares of the World Wealth and Income Database (WID). Globalization is measured by the KOF index of globalization. Static...

We examine the extent to which government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries since the 1970s. In line with important changes in the global economy and differences across countries, regression results yield heterogeneous inferences depending on the time period and the...