The cross-country correlation between social trust and income equality is well documented, but few studies examine the direction of causality. We show theoretically that by facilitating cooperation, trust may lead to more equal outcomes, while the feedback from inequality to trust is ambiguous....

We study the effects of institutional instability on growth. Using principal components analysis, we construct measures of institutional quality and instability from the political risk index of the International Country Risk Guide. A panel-data analysis of 132 countries during 1984–2004...

The objective of this article is to examine whether public expenditure on higher education has an effect on income inequality by increasing enrollment. Copyright (c) 2008 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

IN HIS RESPONSE TO MY COMMENT (BERGH 2006), LINDERT insinuates repeatedly that my criticisms of his book are little more than ideological bias. In this response, I will try even harder to recur to the facts. Still my conclusion is that Lindert is wrong about work incentives and employment in...

In his book _Growing Public_ (Cambridge University Press), Peter H. Lindert argues that the welfare state is a “free lunchâ€, i.e. has no negative effect on growth, and he uses Sweden to explain this finding, which he calls the free lunch puzzle. In this comment, I claim that Lindert...

We use the Economic Freedom Index (Gwartney, Lawson and Norton 2008) to characterise the institutions of ancient Athens in the fourth century BCE. It has been shown that ancient Greece witness improved living conditions for an extended period of time. Athens in the classical period appears to...

This paper proposes a simple framework to model social preferences in a game theoretic framework which explicitly separates economic incentives from social (context) effects. It is argued that such a perspective makes it easier to analyse contextual effects. Moreover, the framework is used to...