microfinance, banking to the poor, is a recent global phenomenon introduced as a way for combating the poverty in the 1970’s. before that the poor were not allowed access to credit and loans due to the widespread belief that the poor could not repay loans. but microfinance movement with financial innovations reduced the costs and risks of lending to poor households, and presented as tool for re...

Social scientists and philosophers have been concerned with issues surrounding the distribution of income or income inequality for over 200 years—the economist and philosopher Adam Smith discussed these issues as early as 1776. Academic writers have been writing on income inequality measurement issues for at least a century. Policy makers have also long been interested in income inequality issu...

Dual income tax systems can suffer from income that shifts from progressively taxed labour income to capital income, which is taxed at a lower, flat rate. This paper empirically examines the 1993 Finnish dual income tax reform, which radically reduced the marginal tax rates on capital income for some, but not all, taxpayers. We measure how overall taxable income and the relative shares of capit...

Using transnational terrorism data from 1980 to 2000, this study empirically examines the relationships between frequency of participation in transnational terrorism acts and economic development and education improvement. We find an inverse U-shaped association between the frequency of various nationals acting as perpetrators in transnational terrorism acts and per capita income in their respe...

One typically observes differing trends in the distribution of gross incomes across countries. Where do these inequalities originate from? We consider a simple model where individuals have identical preferences but different abilities, and we investigate the impact on the distribution of gross income of changes in the way abilities are distributed among the individuals. Journal of Economic Lite...

We use a firm-CEO assignment framework to model the market for CEO effective labor. In the model’s equilibrium more talented CEOs match with and supply more effort to larger firms. Taxation of CEO incomes affects the equilibrium pricing of CEO effective labor and, hence, spills over and affects firm profits. Absent the ability to tax profits or a direct concern for firm owners, a standard presc...

We examine the introduction of the voluntary filing program (VFP) by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the introduction of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), or Interactive Data as called in the US. XBRL is a machine-readable standardized format for financial reports. The VFP allowed firms to file annual and quarterly reports using XBRL. This program represents a quas...