This research examines theoretically and empirically the economic origins of ethnolinguistic diversity. The empirical analysis constructs detailed data on the distribution of land quality and elevation across contiguous regions, virtual and real countries, and shows that variation in elevation and land quality has contributed signi…cantly to the emergence and persistence of ethnic fractionaliza...

This paper examines recent changes in child poverty and income inequality in the 1990s among America’s racial and immigrant minorities. The analyses are based on data from the 1990 and 2000 Public Use Microdata Samples of the U.S. decennial censuses. First, we document changes in child poverty rates between 1990 and 2000 for several different race and nativity groups. Our results indicate that ...

Migration, Trade and Income This paper explores the relationship between openness to trade, immigration, and income per person across countries. To address endogeneity concerns we extend the instrumentalvariables strategy introduced by Frankel and Romer (1999). We build predictors of openness to immigration and to trade for each country by using information on bilateral geographical and cultura...

Language is at the heart of mental health care. Many high-income countries have sophisticated interpreter services, but in low- and middle-income countries there are not sufficient professional services, let alone interpreter services, and task shifting is used. In this article, we discuss this neglected issue in the context of low- and middle-income countries, where task shifting has been sugg...

Optimality conditions and comparative static properties of the optimal Mirrleesian nonlinear income tax are obtained for a nite population and quasilinear-in-consumption preferences. Contrary to Weymark (1987) who considers quasilinear-in-leisure preferences, the linearity with respect to gross income, which is observed by the government and used as a tax base, is lost. A reduced-form optimal i...

People with disabilities are disproportionately affected by systemic global economic problems such as digital exclusion, income disparity, unemployment and poverty. The Prosperity4all project, an international consortium supported in part by the European Union FP7 program, is seeking to address the economic exclusion of consumers and producers at the margins, including people with disabilities....

ABSTRACT Support for redistribution in developing countries has been found to be weakly related income, meaning the poor are not much likelier than rich support redistribution. If economic self-interest, what explains redistribution? A multilevel regression analysis covering a decade of public opinion data from 18 Latin American finds explanations centered on social affinity. Specifically, peop...

Spatial variation in plant diversity has been attributed to heterogeneity in resource availability for many ecosystems. However, urbanization has resulted in entire landscapes that are now occupied by plant communities wholly created by humans, in which diversity may reflect social, economic, and cultural influences in addition to those recognized by traditional ecological theory. Here we use d...

This paper considers the effects of changes in the income distribution in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. We introduce a new methodology to compare the behavior of agents that occupy the same rank in the two different income distributions but typically have different levels of incomes, and an...

Internation comparisons of average national incomes omit important information about leisure, home production, health, etc. They are also bedevilled by index number problems. This paper suggests ways of combining working hours and life-expectancy with income comparisons, and shows that the fixed-price indexes of real income, such as those in the Penn World Table, substantially understate the in...