The economic analysis of global warming is dominated by models based on optimal growth theory. These representative-agent models have an intrinsic distributional bias in favor of the rich. The bias is compounded by the se of revenue-neutrality in the allocation of emission permits. The result is...

US earnings inequality has increased dramatically since the 1970s, and the prospect of a reversal depends on what caused the trend. The standard explanation emphasizes skill-biased technical change. This paper briefly considers some aggregation issues and then proceeds to outline two alternative...

Temporary workers make up a sizeable part of the labor force in many countries and typically receive wages that are significantly lower than their permanent counterparts. This paper uses an efficiency wage model to explain the wage gap between temporary and permanent workers. High-performing...

A large literature on African economies argues that ethnicity plays a role in the politics and economics of African countries. Unfortunately, much of this literature is speculative or anecdotal because of the lack of data, with the exception of a few papers that examine ethnic networking as a...

The microprocessor and related technologies have transformed corporate and industry structure; applied in a neo?liberal environment, the technologies have had profound effects on the relative power of different groups. Skott and Guy (2007) and Guy and Skott (2008) formalized one aspect of this...

We consider the links between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the distribution of income, as mediated by problems of coordination and control within organizations. In the large corporations of the mid-twentieth century, a highly developed division of labor was coordinated...

Suppose individuals get utilities from the total amount of wealth they hold and from their wealth relative to those immediately below them. This paper studies the distribution of wealth that maximizes an additive welfare function made up of these utilities. It interprets wealth distribution in a...

We investigate Veblen effects on work hours, namely the way that a desire to emulate the consumption standards of the rich induces longer work hours among the rest. Consistent with our model of these asymmetric social comparisons, greater inequality predicts longer work hours in ten OECD...

New information and communication technologies, we argue, have been 'power-biased': in many industries they have allowed firms to monitor workers more closely, thus reducing the power of these workers. An efficiency wage model shows that 'power-biased technical change' in this sense may generate...

This paper investigates whether one’s effort to keep up with the Joneses has any effect on labor supply behavior. We provide a simple model and empirical evidence that labor supply decisions of married women are influenced by relative as well as absolute income of their husbands. We find,...