The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the empirical relationship between income inequality and economic growth using U.S. State-level data during the post-war period. The use of state-level data provides a sample that is relatively homogeneous in many non-economic characteristics, unlike the international data used in most previous work. Building upon prior research, this study addresses t...

This paper focuses on inequality in living standards across oblasts and regions within Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Regional inequality is an important area of research and policy development. Inequality in income and consumption are logical outcomes in a market-based economic system. If inequality within countries exists because of barriers to compe...

The distribution of wealth in the United States and countries around the world is highly skewed. How does visible economic inequality affect well-off individuals' support for redistribution? Using a placebo-controlled field experiment, I randomize the presence of poverty-stricken people in public spaces frequented by the affluent. Passersby were asked to sign a petition calling for greater redi...

Panel data on 54 developing countries between 1960 and 2000 are used to investigate how the impact of opening to trade on economic growth is affected by wealth inequality. The results suggest (a) that opening to trade tends to accelerate growth but (b) that the addition to growth depends inversely on the level of wealth inequality prior to opening. These findings confirm the general importance ...

Considerable concern has been expressed in recent years about declines in voter participation rates in the United States and in several other major democratic countries. Some feel low participation rates introduce a “class bias” into the political process and thereby worsen the outcomes from it. Little empirical work exists, however, that measures the effects of lower participation on the welfa...

Researchers and pundits alike view the state of the national economy as a key determinant of vote decisions and election outcomes: voters reward or punish the incumbent party as national economic conditions improve or decline. In an era of rising income inequality, however, national conditions provide relatively poor information to voters about how the incumbent is handling the economy in their...

This article suggests that an important source of political conflict in Latin America and the Caribbean is the disagreement among the citizenry on the role of government in reducing economic inequality, particularly between the very rich and the poor. While the poor clamor for vigorous public policies to reduce economic inequality, the rich show significantly lower support. The findings of this...

The paper provides estimates of the effect of economic inequality on middle class well being in Switzerland. Economic well being is proxied by a person’s satisfaction with his/her income. Two inequality indicators are used, one standard (the Gini coefficient of the pre-tax income distribution) and one novel (the number of luxury car registrations per 1000 population). Identification is through ...

the aim of this study was to determine the socioeconomic inequalities in nonuse of seatbelts in cars and helmets on motorcycles in kurdistan province, west of iran, 2009.the data used in this study was collected from the data gathered in non-communicable disease surveillance system (ncdss) in 2009 in kurdistan. a total of 1000 people were included in this study. the outcome variable of this stu...