Modern political economy stresses “society’s polarization” as a determinant of development outcomes. Among the most common sources of social polarization are class divisions and ethnic divisions. A middle class consensus is defined as a high share of income for the middle class and a low degree of ethnic divisons. A middle class consensus distinguishes development successes from failures. The p...

This paper examines unionism’s relationship to the size of the middle class and its relationship to intergenerational mobility. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) 1985 and 2011 files are used to examine the change in the share of workers in a middle-income group (defined by persons having incomes within 50 percent of the median) and use a shift-share decomposition to explore how the decline ...

Objectives: Income poverty is one of the most common problems of old age, it varies among older adults living in different societies. The aim of this study is to investigate the predictors of income poverty of older adults based on the data of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Methods: The secondary data analysis method was used in the present study. The i...

BACKGROUND Dimensions of the individual socioeconomic position-education, social class, social status and income-are associated with mortality. Inequalities in death also related to the social position of the household. It is, however, less clear how the socioeconomic position of one marital/cohabiting partner influences the mortality of the other partner. We examine the independent effect on m...

BACKGROUND A low socioeconomic position (SEP) is consistently associated with ill health, sickness absence (SA) and permanent disability, but studies among young employees are lacking. We examined the interrelationships between education, occupational class and income as determinants of SA among 25-34-year-old employees. We also examined, whether the association between SEP and SA varied over t...

The authors argue that Wilkinson's model omits important variables (social class) that make it vulnerable to biases due to model mis-specification. Furthermore, the culture of inequality hypothesis unnecessarily "psychopathologizes" the relatively deprived while omitting social determinants of disease related to production (environmental and occupational hazards) and the capacity of the relativ...

We study the effect of competition on income distribution by means of a two-stage experiment. Heterogenous endowments are earned in a contest, being followed by a surplus-sharing task. The experimental test confirms our initial hypothesis that the existence of a middle class is as effective as institutional hurdles in limiting the power of the less able in order to protect the more able players...