In Israel, rural communities are those with up to 2000 residents, and rural areas include only rural communities. This paper explores the dependence of rural incomes on nearby urban areas. This dependence is mostly implied by rural-to-urban or urban-to-rural selective migration (or both)....

The income inequality implications of land reform are examined for the case of Georgia using regression-based inequality decomposition techniques. An egalitarian land redistribution is likely to equalize per-capita income among farm households, implying that continuing the land reform process in...

This paper performs inequality decomposition by income sources using data from three different continents, using a unified inequality decomposition approach. Household survey data from Ethiopia, Georgia and Korea are used for this purpose, and the uniform result is that non-farm labor income is...

The issue of inequality received much attention in the economic literature in the last two decades, motivated by the recognition that inequality is not only an outcome of growth but also a determinant of growth. The increased availability of survey data has led to numerous empirical studies of...

Democracy tends to cultivate short-sighted politicians, for whom the horizon extends more or less till next election. This feature gives rise to a discrepancy between the time rate of discount of a country’s polity and the interest rates at which the country borrows. I show how this...

Replaced with revised version of paper Jan. 11, 2012

This paper explores the relationship between income distribution, prices, production efficiency and aggregate output in a decentralized search economy. We show that income distribution determines how competitive the market is, and thereby affects production efficiency and aggregate output. It is...