Does redistribution in democracies cater to the will of the majority? We propose a direct empirical strategy based on survey data that needs not assume that voters are guided by pecuniary motives alone. We find that most democracies implement the median voter's preferred amount of redistribution...

Does redistribution in democracies cater to the will of the majority? We propose a direct empirical strategy based on survey data that needs not assume that voters are guided by pecuniary motives alone. We find that most democracies implement the median voter's preferred amount of redistribution...

Using full-population register data from Denmark, this study shows that estimates of the economic gradient in mortality depends on the specific measure of economic resources used, where we investigate permanent income, annual income or financial and housing wealth. Our favorite measure is what...

Most party systems have seen a considerable rise in polarization during the past decades. We show that fiscal policies have contributed to this development. Our macro-level analysis of 166 elections since 1980 finds that austerity increases both electoral abstention and votes for non-mainstream...

This paper presents and then tests a political economy model to analyze the observed positive relationship between income inequality and inflation. The model's key features are unequal access to both inflation-hedging opportunities and the political process. The model predicts that inequality...

This paper studies how the political elite uses nationalism as a tool for altering the preferences of the voting public. A model is designed to explain how a change in income inequality motivates political parties to use nationalism. The model concludes that increased income inequality...

This paper presents an attempt to quantify institutional changes and examine the respective effects of de jure and de facto political institutions on the path of long-run economic growth and development for a large panel of countries in the period 1810–2000. Using factor analysis, latent...

This paper studies, within a growth model, some effects of the inequality between the profit and growth rates on the reproduction of economic elites. To this end, it considers as functions of the capital/income ratio the relations between, on the one hand, the rate of economic growth and, on the...