Explaining Inequality the World Round: Cohort Size, Kuznets Curves, and Openness

Explaining Inequality the World Round: Cohort Size, Kuznets Curves, and Openness

Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire have recently produced an inequality data base for a panel of countries from the 1960s to the 1990s. We use these data to decompose the sources of inequality into three central parts: the demographic or cohort size effect; the so-called Kuznets Curve or demand effects; and the commitment to globalization or policy effects. We also control for education supply, the...

Nber Working Paper Series Explaining Inequality the World Round: Cohort Size, Kuznets Curves, and Openness

We would like to thank Abhijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, Michael Kremer, Andrew Warner, David Weil and participants at the Harvard-MIT Growth and Development Workshop for helpful comments and suggestions. In addition, we are grateful to Leonardo Bartolini and Alan Drazen for providing a tabulation of the IMF data on capital controls. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and not those o...

Trade openness, capital openness and government size

This paper provides empirical evidence of the relation between trade openness, capital openness and government expenditures in a cross-sectional time-series context. It is shown that capital openness is significantly and negatively related to government expenditures in line with the conventional wisdom that capital mobility may undermine the ability of governments to maintain larger public sect...

Household Production and Environmental Kuznets Curves

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the widely debated empirical finding of “Environmental Kuznets Curves”, i.e., U-shaped relationships between per-capita income and indicators of environmental quality. We present a household-production model in which the degradation of environmental quality is a by-product of household activities. Households can not directly purchase environment...

Are Environmental Kuznets Curves Misleading Us?