All industrial democracies have public pension or social security schemes that account for a substantial portion of the disposal income of the aged. Although some countries introduced public pensions as early as the 19 century, large scale social security systems did not emerge as an important feature of the welfare state in most OECD countries until after World War II. The involvement of the g...

This paper provides what we believe to be the first collection of data on social capital in the transition countries of Central/Eastern Europe and of the former Soviet Union. Using data from the World Values Survey 1990 and 1995 we document the degree of trust and of civic participation and find that these indicators of social capital are significantly lower than in OECD countries. The paper al...

Inrecent years political scientists and economists have spent considerable efforts investigating the impact of income inequality both on political institutions and social conflict (Boix 2003, 2008; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Geddes 2007) and on growth and development (Atkinson andBourguignon 2000). In this article I focus on the latter question: I discuss the extent to which (that is, the cond...

Word co-occurrence networks are one of the most common linguistic networks studied in the past and they are known to exhibit several interesting topological characteristics. In this article, we investigate the global topological properties of word co-occurrence networks and, in particular, present a detailed study of their spectrum. Our experiments reveal certain universal trends found across t...

We provide an political-institutional explanation for the enormous variance in the extent to which democratic governments redistributes income from rich to poor. In addition to the number of veto points, which has been emphasized in the existing literature, we show the importance of the skill system and of the electoral system. The nature of skills is important because it determines the demand ...

The recent decades of public employment have passed in a continuous wave between the maintenance of the Weberian “bureaucratic ideal” (Weber, 1978, pp. 220–221) and the new trend of the seventies, the 3Es (economy, effectiveness, efficiency) The essence of the “fight” can be summarised in the way how, and by how much, individual countries deviate from the ideal of the public servant independent...

Many of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries use global budgeting to control all or certain portions of their health care expenditures. Although the use of global budgets as a cost-containment tool has not been implemented in the United States in any comprehensive way, recent health care reform initiatives have increased the need for research into such tools. In g...

The first section of this paper reviews the most recent evidence on inequality in 18 Latin American countries and shows that in all but four the changes in inequality over the 1990s were small and insignificant. The distribution depends on the ownership and rate of return on assets, particularly human capital. In the short run changes in these two variables tend to be offsetting-growth widens s...

We examine the distribution of hours of work across industrial sectors in OECD countries. We find large disparities when sectors are divided into three groups: one that produces goods without home substitutes and two others that have home substitutes — health and social work, and all others. We attribute the disparities to the countries’ tax and subsidy policies. High taxation substantially red...