The vast majority of civil wars occur in economically less developed countries, as measured by GDP per capita. This paper assesses two suggested explanations for this: one emphasizing that poverty facilitates rebel recruitment due to lowered economic opportunity cost of rebelling, and the other...

The paper discusses the U-shaped relationship between the equivalence scale ne and the Gini index instead of considering the equivalence scale's relationship to the generalised entropy measures, which was studied by Coulter, et al. (1992). An end-point condition is given for the U-shaped...

A common assumption in political economy is that voters are self-regarding maximizers of material goods, choosing their preferred level of social spending accordingly. In contrast, students of American social policy have emphasized the key role of an other-regarding motive that makes support for...

In the context of polarized societies, income homogeneity is linked to the frequency and the intensity of social unrest. Most homogenous countries exhibit a lower frequency of intense social conflicts and less homogeneous countries show a higher frequency of moderate social conflicts. This paper...

Fiscal redistribution by the state provides a powerful counterweight to the growth of market income inequality in post-industrial democracies. Yet, significant questions remain about what explains the substantial variation in redistribution across nations and time in the contemporary era. In...

Mandelbrot (1960) proposed using the so-called Pareto-Lévy class of distributions as a framework for representing income distributions. We argue in this paper that the Pareto-Lévy distribution is an interesting candidate for representing income distribution because its parameters are easy to...

The openness to international trade and capital movements of industrialized countries has increased substantially during the recent decades. At the same time, most of these countries experienced a rise in income dispersion. Against this background, the paper analyzes empirically whether the...

In this paper, we define a tractable procedure to measure worker incomplete information in the labor market. The procedure, which makes use of earnings distribution skewness, is based on econometric frontier estimation techniques, and is consistent with search theory. We apply the technique to...