Using a panel data set for 18 Asian countries over the period 1970-2008, this study explores the relationship between economic growth and income inequality with special focus on the role of credit market imperfections in shaping the linkage. The study identifies credit market imperfections in...

This paper provides a simple theory to study how the allocation of public funds between primary and higher education affects human capital accumulation. The allocation is endogenously determined through majority voting. Public funding for higher education is not supported when a majority is...

Recent theoretical contributions assert that income inequality impacts negatively human capital accumulation, and consequently long-run growth. Galor and Zeira (1993) show that such a relationship works primarily through financial constraints, while de la Croix and Doepke (2003) demonstrate that...

This paper examines the cubic form hypothesis and the flying geese pattern hypothesis of income distribution. We use time series data for the Gini coefficients of Korea for 1961-2006 and panel data calculated based on a household income survey for the period 1998-2003. We show; (1) The Korean...

This paper investigates whether the ‘Kuznets hypothesis’, that economic growth from low levels of GDP per capita is initially associated with an increase in income inequality and later followed by a decline in inequality, is supported by evidence for a less-developed country, Indonesia. The...

Generally, econometric studies on socio-economic inequalities consider regions as independent entities, ignoring the likely possibility of spatial interaction between them. This interaction may cause spatial dependency or clustering, which is referred to as spatial autocorrelation. This paper...

This paper argues that individuals concerns for relative position contribute to the emergence of development traps. It demonstrates that changes in the mean and the distribution of income qualitatively modify individual’s reference group by affecting the magnitude of the reference standard....

This paper applies insights from theoretical and empirical research in economic growth to analyze the impacts of policies affecting fertility, migration and human capital accumulation on growth and poverty alleviation. It underlines the tradeoff between having more children and investing more...

This paper estimates with the least trimmed least squares (LTS) a specification suitable to estimate the permanent growth effects of human capital, using educational attainment (H) as a proxy. Our results show that H has significant permanent growth effects but these are much smaller than in...

We study the economic structure of the life of Harry Potter and his co-actors as an economic model that governs the social organization of their economic activities. Our goal is to study and understand the internal consistency of the Potterian economic model and explore the relationships between...