This paper examines the impact of higher education on the labour share. It is based on the following idea: as education offers adaptability skills, it should reduce employers’ monopsony power and, therefore, increase the labour share. This idea is developed in a two-sector model with search...

The shares of capital and labour in national income vary substantially both over time and across countries. This paper shows that the factor distribution of income is an essential determinant of the personal distribution of income. We use cross-country and panel data for a group of developed and...

A substantial literature has examined the determinants of support for democracy and although existing work has found a gender gap in democratic attitudes, there have been no attempts to explain it. In this paper we try to understand why females are less supportive of democracy than males in a...

A substantial literature has examined the determinants of support for democracy and although existing work has found a gender gap in democratic attitudes, there have been no attempts to explain it. In this paper we try to understand why females are less supportive of democracy than males in a...

Differences in promotion across genders are still prevalent in many occupations. Recent work based on experimental evidence indicates that women participate less in or exert lower effort during contests. We exploit the unique features of the promotion system for French academics to look at...

This paper uses data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine some of the forces that have driven changes in household income inequality over the last three decades of the 20th century. We decompose inequality for 6 countries (Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US) into the...

We examine the determinants of income inequality and mobility in a Ramsey model with elastic labor supply. Individuals differ both in their initial capital endowment and productive ability (labor endowment). With two sources of heterogeneity, initially poorer agents may catch up with the income...

The key institution that determines sustained growth in R&D-based growth models is the strength of intellectual property rights, which are usually assumed to be exogenous. In this paper we endogenize the strength of the intellectual property rights and show how private incentives to protect...

We explore the impact of macroeconomic volatility on the distribution of income. Using a cross-section of developed and developing countries, we find that greater output volatility, defined as the standard deviation of the rate of output growth, is associated with a higher Gini coefficient and...