Hobbes to Rousseau: Inequality, Institutions and Development

Hobbes to Rousseau: Inequality, Institutions, and Development

Hobbes to Rousseau: Inequality, Institutions, and Development This paper studies the endogenous evolution of economic and political institutions and the interdependencies with the process of economic development. Favorable economic institutions in form of a social contract that ensures a state of law and the absence of societal conflict are not assumed exogenously under certain political system...

It is Hobbes , not Rousseau : an experiment on voting and redistribution

We perform an experiment which provides a laboratory replica of some important features of the welfare state. In the experiment, all individuals in a group decide whether to make a costly effort, which produces a random (independent) outcome for each one of them. The group members then vote on whether to redistribute the resulting and commonly known total sum of earnings equally amongst themsel...

Wage Inequality, Technology and Institutions

Rousseau and Criticism Rousseau et la Critique

Labour Market Institutions and Wage Inequality

In this paper we investigate the importance of labor market institutions such as unemployment insurance, unions, …ring regulation and minimum wages for the evolution of male wage inequality across countries. We derive a simple log-linear equation of the wage di¤erential as a function of the institutional parameters, total factor productivity, …nal good prices and relative skill supply. Our esti...