We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

Some scholars suggest that the Middle East's oil wealth helps explain its failure to democratize. This article examines three aspects of this “oil impedes democracy” claim. First, is it true? Does oil have a consistendy antidemocratic effect on states, once other factors are accounted for? Second, can this claim be generalized? Is it true only in the Middle East or elsewhere as well? Is it true for other types of mineral wealth and other types of commodity wealth or only for oil? Finally, if oil does have antidemocratic properties, what is the causal mechanism?The author uses pooled time-series cross-national data from 113 states between 1971 and 1997 to show that oil exports are strongly associated with authoritarian rule; that this effect is not limited to the Middle East; and that other types of mineral exports have a similar antidemocratic effect, while other types of commodity exports do not.The author also tests three explanations for this pattern: a “rentier effect,” which suggests that resource-rich governments use low tax rates and patronage to dampen democratic pressures; a “repression effect,” which holds that resource wealth enables governments to strengthen their internal security forces and hence repress popular movements; and a “modernization effect,” which implies that growth that is based on the export of oil and minerals will fail to bring about die social and cultural changes that tend to produce democratic government. He finds at least limited support for all three effects.

Does Oil Hinder Democracy

where A represents the magnetic vector potential, is an integral of the hydromagnetic equations. This -integral made it possible to formulate a variational principle for the force-free magnetic fields. The integral expresses the fact that motions cannot transform a given field in an entirely arbitrary different field, if the conductivity of the medium isconsidered infinite. In this paper we shall show that the full set of hydromagnetic equations admit five more integrals, besides the energy integral, if dissipative processes are absent. These integrals, as we shall presently verify, are I2 =fbHvdV, (2)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. They also fail to explain why institutions are influenced by the past, why it is that they can sometimes change, why they differ so much from society to society, and why it is hard to study them empirically and devise a policy aimed at altering them. This 2006 book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration. It presents a multi-disciplinary perspective to study endogenous institutions and their dynamics.

/pdf/institutions-and-the-path-to-the-modern-economy-4dlla029fs.pdf

Institutions and the path to the modern economy

Virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is Pareto efficient. Within many African households, agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household. Pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots. I find, in contrast, that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men. The estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household. The paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results.

/pdf/gender-agricultural-production-and-the-theory-of-the-2qev0ck25u.pdf

Gender, Agricultural Production, and the Theory of the Household

Deposits, Bankruptcy, and Notarial Credit in Late Eighteenth-Century Paris

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/renref/article/download/12067/8942

Church and community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1789

Capitalism and Financial Development: The Case of Mortgage Markets in France,

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenth- and seventeenth century France--a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations early modern historians have tended to rely upon.

Economic Theory and Sharecropping in Early Modern France

This article seeks to explain how the information technology that is essential for the operation of credit markets is created or destroyed. Information technology of this sort is a form of social capital, and the article also seeks to understand how institutions linked to such social capital arise or disappear. It does so by looking at 67 different credit markets scattered throughout France and examining their evolution both before and after the French Revolution. The aim is to follow the consequences of the great changes that the Revolution brought about. It turns out that the institutions of credit markets were not uniformed across France, but they were not peculiar to each local market either. Rather, there were two distinct institutional patterns – one found in Northern France and the other typical of the South – and in each region the institutions of credit markets evolved in a different way. Institutions were also different in the city and in the countryside, and as a result there were really four distinct systems of credit, each with distinctive types of loans and financial intermediaries, who were trained in dissimilar ways. The existence of such differences implies that institutions depended on the volume of lending in each market and also on the level of inequality.

Philip T. Hoffman

Papers

Deposits, Bankruptcy, and Notarial Credit in Late Eighteenth-Century Paris

Church and community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1789

Capitalism and Financial Development: The Case of Mortgage Markets in France,

Economic Theory and Sharecropping in Early Modern France

Revolution and Evolution