This paper documents the persistence of the Southern slave owning elite in political power after the end of the American Civil War. We draw on a database of Texan state legislators between 1860 and 1900 and link them to their or their ancestors' slaveholdings in 1860. We then show that former...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, attention concerning inequality as a risk factor has risen. Nevertheless studies, focusing on the implications of inequality as a collective risk, remain seldom. Therefore the following paper will discuss why inequality is indeed a collective risk,...

Does identification with dominant ethnic groups lead individuals to diverge in their preferences for redistribution? This paper contributes to the comparative analysis of the role of ethnic background in shaping attitudes towards government's role in reducing income inequalities in Indonesia,...

The Inequality Barometer is an online survey first conducted in Germany in 2020. It gauges individual perceptions of multiple aspects of inequality and social mobility as well as a range of policy preferences related to inequality. Responses were collected for a representative sample of the...

We design a series of simulation-based thought experiments to deductively evaluate the causal effects of various factors on wealth inequality (the distribution) and social mobility (dynamics of the distribution). We find that uncertainty per se can lead to a “natural” degree of inequality...