The explosion of the global financial crisis in 2008 and its transmission to the real economies have been interpreted as calling for new kinds of regulation of the banking and the financial systems that would have allowed reestablishing a virtuous relation between the real and the financial...

For the past few years there has been a call to raise the Federal Minimum Wage to $15.00 per hour. The purpose of this article is to remind the reader that a wage earner receives the higher of the Federal, State, City, and in many cases the private sector company’s minimum wage. But more...

Similar to many sub-Saharan African countries, Sudan has inherited a dual economy in the immediate post-independence era where a large agriculture-based rural traditional sector coexisted with a small non-agricultural modern sector. This functional dualism remained until the first oil shipment...

This paper suggests that, with the help of Concordian economics, the economic process can be studied through the perspectives of Production of real wealth; Distribution of ownership rights; Consumption of financial instruments (as well as the integration of these three perspectives). The...

This paper introduces the problem of a planner who wants to control a population of heterogeneous agents subject to idiosyncratic shocks. The agents differ in their initial states and in the realization of the shocks. In continuous time, the distribution of states across agents is described by a...

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French thinker who did most of his writing in the last six years of his life. One of his major contributions to economic thought was his application of opportunity cost to a wide range of economic policies. The present paper uses the Bastiat approach to...

This paper combines cross-sectional and longitudinal income data to present the evolution of absolute intergenerational income mobility in ten developed economies in the 20th century. Absolute mobility decreased during the second half of the 20th century in all these countries. Increasing income...

This paper combines historical cross-sectional and longitudinal data in the US to study patterns of economic growth within the income distribution. We quantify absolute mobility as the fraction of families with higher income over a period of several years. The rates of absolute mobility over...

We analyze the evolution of aggregate household wealth, its composition, and top wealth shares since the mid-19th century for the Netherlands, a country which played a significant role in economic history. The main forces at play are the size and variation of colonial wealth up until WWII, and...