Politicians may use disguised' redistributive policies in order to circumvent opposition to explicit tax-transfer schemes. First, we present a theoretical model that formalizes this hypothesis; then we provide evidence that in US cities, politicians use public employment as such a redistributive...

Developing countries with highly unequal income distributions, such as Brazil or South Africa, face an uphill battle in reducing inequality. Educated workers in these countries have a much lower birthrate than uneducated workers. Assuming children of educated workers are more likely to become...

We prove that, for general demand and cost conditions and market structures, the fraction of first-best surplus that a monopolist is unable to extract in a market provides a tight upper bound on the relative distortions arising from firms' equilibrium decisions at all margins (entry and...

Quah's [1993a] transition matrix analysis of world income distribution based on annual data suggests an ergodic distribution with twin peaks at the rich and poor end of the distribution. Since the ergodic distribution is a highly non-linear function of the underlying transition matrix estimated...

Evidence from the US, Britain, and France suggests that recent growth in wage inequality has been accompanied by greater segregation of high- and low-skill workers into separate firms. A model in which workers of different skill-levels are imperfect substitutes can simultaneously account for...

May 2000 - A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic polarization are empirically associated with higher income, higher growth, more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war (putting ethnic...