A number of cross-country comparisons do not find a robust negative relationship between government size and economic growth. In part this may reflect the prediction in economic theory that a negative relationship should exist primarily for rich countries with large public sectors. In this paper...

Unlike previous analyses, we consider (i) that IT may affect productivity growth both directly and indirectly, through human capital interactions, and (ii) possible externalities in the use of IT. Examining, hypothetically, the statistical consequences of erroneously disregarding (i) and (ii) we...

Our study extends research on the feminization of poverty by analyzing the variation in women's, men's and feminized poverty across affluent democracies from 1969 to 2000. Specifically, we address three issues. First, we provide more recent estimates of adult women's and men's poverty and the...

This study investigates the impact of Left political institutions on a nation's amount of poverty. Specifically, the analysis tests three possible causal relationships: whether Left political institutions affect poverty separately from the welfare state, channeled through the welfare state, or...

Liberal economic precepts have long been a foundation for the social science of poverty and continue to profoundly influence public policy. Liberal economics contends that poverty is dependent on the harmonious progress of economic growth, free market capitalism, worker productivity, and the...

This paper explores the sources of variation in state redistribution across 13 developed democracies over the 1979-2000 period, drawing upon data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the Luxembourg Income Study and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems....

Aims: We analyzed the redistributive outcomes for sickness benefits using a typology of social insurance institutions compared to external factors for sickness risk. Material: Unbalanced panel data of the Luxembourg Income Study on household earnings, sickness benefits and labour force...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes according to features related to centralisation is...

High rates of corporate taxation reduce corporate investment and thereby depress local wages. Using cross-country data from the Luxembourg Income Study, I estimate that a ten percentage point increase in the corporate tax rate of high-income countries reduces mean annual gross wages by seven...