This paper uses a cross-state panel for the United States over the 1976 to 2007 period to assess the relationship between income inequality and the inflation rate. Employing a semiparametric instrument variable (IV) estimator, we find that the relationship depends on the level of the inflation rate. A positive relationship occurs only if the states exceed a threshold level of inflation rate. Be...

The paper describes within-neighborhood economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas in 1985 and 1993. It uses the neighborhood clusters of the American Housing Survey, standardized by metropolitan area income and household size, to explore income distribution within neighborhoods at a scale much smaller than the census tract (a representative sample of households or ‘kernels’ and their ten ...

In a matching model of firm formation with moral hazard, we characterize the equilibrium for economies with scarcity of capital and study the effects of redistributive taxation. We give necessary and sufficient conditions determining the equilibrium matching patterns, payoffs and interest rate. These depend only on aggregate wealth and the median wealth relative to the active population, compar...

This paper investigates the relationship between growth and inequality from a demographic point of view. In an extended model of the accidental bequest with endogenous fertility, we analyze the effects of a decrease in the old-age mortality rate on the equilibrium growth rate as well as on the income distribution. We show that the relationship between growth and inequality is at first positive ...

The Public Perception and Normative Valuation of Executive Compensation: An International Comparison This paper describes individuals’ perceptions and normative valuations of executive compensation using comparable survey data for fifteen OECD member countries. An overwhelming majority of individuals (more than 90%) believes that top executives earn more than they actually deserve. However, the...

I study a problem of repeated moral hazard in which the effect of effort is persistent over time: each period’s outcome distribution is a function of a geometrically distributed lag of past efforts. I show that when the utility of the agent is linear in effort, a simple rearrangement of terms in his lifetime utility translates this problem into a related standard repeated moral hazard. The solu...

Majority voting and social evaluation functions are the main alternatives proposed in the literature for aggregatingindividual preferences. Despite these being very different, this papershows that the ranking of income distributions, symmetric under the same transformation, by S-Gini consistent social evaluation functions and majority voting coincide if and only if the inequality index under co...

This paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political “fundamentals” can sustain such different systems of social insurance, fiscal redistribution, and education finance as those of the United States and Western Europe. With imperfect credit and insurance markets some redistributive policies can improve ex ante wel...

This paper provides an overview of methodologies used to analyze inter-regional income inequality, and a critical survey of empirical studies that deal with Russian regions. It discusses implications of the growth theory regarding dynamics of inter-economy income inequality. Methodologies for empirically analyzing income inequality are classified as the cross-section approach, time series appro...

In this paper, we show that a concept of aggregation can hold in network games. Breaking up large networks into smaller pieces, which can be replaced by representative players, leads to a coarse-grained description of strategic interactions. This method of summarizing complex strategic interactions by simple ones can be applied to compute Nash equilibria. We also provide an application to publi...