This symposium article addresses the question of whether payday and title lenders serve primarily the working poor, as some critics claim, or the middle class, as the payday and title loan industries claim. This article starts by discussing how and why lenders claim to serve the middle class. It...

Middle class values have long been perceived as drivers of social cohesion and growth. This paper investigates the relation between class (measured by position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American countries. The...

This research studies the stylized fact of a “gender gap” in that women tend to have lower financial literacy than men. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap. This result is not explained by men's low financial literacy, nor by women's high income...

Middle class values have long been perceived as drivers of social cohesion and growth. This paper investigates the relation between class (measured by position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American countries. The...

Die Beiträge des Bandes untersuchen die unterschiedlichen Dimensionen der lateinamerikanischen Sozialstruktur seit der Jahrtausendwende. Klassische Fragestellungen der Sozialstrukturanalyse finden ebenso Beachtung wie jüngere Forschungsfelder. Der vorliegende Sammelband vereint innovative...

After the fierce class struggles in the first postwar years, a societal model describing Japan as a general middle-class society with outstanding equality in opportunities and outcome became dominant. In recent years, a new societal model of Japan as a divided society has replaced this general...