Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on overlapping and closely related topics. Research on...

Many studies in social sciences have suggested different approaches to explain the violent crime in society, such as the heat hypothesis that more violence is associated to very hot weather. However, these approaches provide a partial explanation of this social issue. This study shows that,...

The enormous increase in economic inequality in the United States should play a central role in public discourse about the federal deficit. This essay reviews statistical evidence of trends in the distribution of income and wealth in the United States. The evidence demonstrates a dramatic...

In this article the author considers an economy in which individuals are matched into pairs and the desirability of an individual depends on her position on the distribution of wealth. The author assumes that individuals show their relative standing by consuming a conspicuous good and he shows...

In this article the author considers an economy in which individuals are matched into pairs and the desirability of an individual depends on her position on the distribution of wealth. He assumes that individuals show their relative standing by consuming a conspicuous good and he shows that...

We investigate consumer choice where individuals care not only about the absolute values of consumption, but also about their status. This is defined as their ordinal rank in the distribution of consumption of one "positional" good. In such a situation, the consumer's problem becomes strategic...

Da die Analyse von Einkommensverteilungen auf äquivalenzgewichteten Einkommen beruht, ist die Entwicklung der Einkommensungleichheit nicht nur Ausdruck für Veränderungen in der Entlohnungsstruktur, sondern auch für Veränderungen von Haushaltsgröße und -zusammensetzung. In den letzten 15...

In Germany, two observations can be tracked over the past 15 to 20 years: First, income inequality has constantly increased while, second, the average household size has been declining dramatically. The analysis of income distribution relies on equivalence-weighted incomes, which take into...

Using newly comprehensive data and tools from the Global Consumption and Income Project or CGIP, covering most of the world and five decades, we present a portrait of the changing global distribution of consumption and income and discuss its implications for our understanding of inequality,...

Since Aristotle, a vast literature has suggested that economic inequality has important political consequences. Higher inequality is thought to increase demand for government income redistribution in democracies and to discourage democratization and promote class conflict and revolution in...