This paper explores how wealth and inequality can affect self-governed solutions to commons dilemmas by constraining group cooperation. It reports a series of experiments in the field where subjects are actual commons users. Household data about the participants’ context explain statistically the usually observed wide variation found within and across groups in similar experiments. Participants...

Empirical evidence, obtained from nonparametric estimation of the income distribution, exhibits strong heterogeneity in most populations of interest. It is common, therefore, to suspect that the population is composed of several homogeneous subpopulations. Such an assumption leads us to consider mixed income distributions whose components feature the distributions of the incomes of a particular...

In this paper, we develop nonlinear constitutive equations and resulting system models quantifying the nonlinear and hysteretic field-displacement relations inherent to piezoceramic elements employed in present nanopositioner designs. We focus specifically on piezoceramic rods utilizing d33 motion and piezoceramic shells driven in d31 regimes, but the modeling framework is sufficiently general ...

We study a fundamental conflict in economic decision-making, the trade-off between equality, equity and incentives, in a new experimental game that nests a voluntary contributions mechanism in a broader spectrum of incentive schemes. In a 2x2 design, we let subjects either vote on or exogenously encounter incentive settings while assigned unequal endowments are either task-determined or random....

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income and consumption inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989–90. Using microdata from the 1985–92 Household Budget Surveys, we find that overall income inequality increased in 1989 but subsequently declined to pretransition levels. The distribution of consumption reveals a similar pattern. Social...

Political parties can be vehicles for economic and social development in poor countries. They can also serve as rent seeking instruments. Uncovering how parties function is therefore key to establishing the preconditions for good governance. The paper discusses when and why clientelism on the basis of party affiliation may arise. Operationally, party-based clientelism is defined as a bias of pu...

Do husbands and wives have the same view of the family’s financial situation? This research shows that when couples are asked separately about finances, very different views emerge of income and wealth. Quantifying the gap between husbands’ and wives’ financial statements shows half of all couples provide family income values that differ by more than 10% and net worth values that differ by more...

We analyze a model in which workers must be allocated to tasks to produce. There are differences among the workers in absolute ability that are independent of the activity they perform. We demonstrate a unique competitive equilibrium that determines both wages and the allocation of workers to tasks. The equilibrium wage has the property that workers assigned to the lowest ‘‘value-added’’ tasks ...

A modelling framework is developed for describing income-age trajectories that is useful for summarizing not only the average profile for a group of individuals with similar characteristics, but also how individual trajectories differ from the group average. Using data from waves 1-17 of the British Household Panel Survey, the model is estimated separately for twelve groups of individuals diffe...

This paper examines whether, in the absence of information on household income or consumption, data on household infrastructure, building materials, and ownership of certain durable assets can be used to measure inequality in living standards. Principal components analysis is used to obtain a relative measure of inequality, and a bootstrap prediction method is provided for use when auxiliary su...