In the literature wage inequality is commonly traced back to globalization. As this is a too loose category to be used in an empirical investigation, I will assume that globalization in the larger sense may provide an introductory explanation for a somewhat similarly wide economic variable as the labour share. In fact, as shown by on the basis of the computations conducted by Bertoli and Farina...

Shadow Economies and Corruption All Over the World: What Do We Really Know? Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of “official” GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing countries is 38.7%, in 25 t...

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...

The book defines three different concepts of world or inter-national inequality. The first uses unweighted countries’ GDPs per capita, the second, populationweighted GDPs per capita, the third, combines inter-national and internal income distribution to derive “true” world income distribution. According to the first and the second concept, inter-national inequality respectively increased and de...

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 ...