Chapter from: 'Rising Inequality in China: Challenge to a Harmonious Society', edited by Shi Li, Hiroshi Sato and Terry Sicular.

Although there exists a vast literature on convergence and divergence of income levels across countries or regions at the aggregate level, there is only little work on convergence and/or diver- gence processes of productivity and wage levels at the more disaggregated industrial level. These are...

This study deals with the determinants of factor demand in 27 industries of the manufacturing sector during the period 1978 to 1990. Using a quadratic cost function, six production factors are distinguished : capital, energy, three types of labour and intermediate materials. A parametric test of...

This paper documents that standard cross-sectional determinants of firm leverage also apply to the capital structure of large banks in the United States and Europe. We find a remarkable consistency in sign, significance and economic magnitude. Like non-financial firms, banks appear to have...

Environmental tax schemes in OECD countries often involve tax rates differentiated across industrial, commercial and household sectors. In this paper, we investigate four potentially important arguments for these deviations from uniform taxation: pre-existing tax distortions, domestic equity...

This paper investigates the economic impacts of environmental tax reforms designed to reach given emission reduction targets for the German economy. Our focus is on the efficiency and employment implications of alternative schemes for emission tax differentiation between the production sector...

In contrast to the usual approach taken in the literature, in which an Industry Life Cycle (ILC) is reproduced by aggregate functions, the model of this paper generates a self-organizing ILC. A general evolutionary agent-based simulation model is developed that can be adapted for specific...