Inequality & Distribution

What is at stake : Increasing doubt over the virtue of democracy. One cannot doubt the ubiquitous lack of confidence and hope in the so-called democratic institutions by a large majority of the people. The fundamental cause is the blatant contradiction between the principle of democracy, promoting the rule and thereby the welfare of the people, and the indomitable tendency of rising and unsustainable inequality in terms of income, standard of living and wealth.

The central concepts of Keynes’ macroeconomic theories concerning the behavior of labor markets, aggregate demand, and asset pricing can be formulated as special cases of a general social interaction model.

In this paper, we deal with the complex relationship connecting inequality to innovation, and the ways through which public investment, in particular public participation to R&D initiatives, may affect it. We first stress that multiple different equilibria may exist in the inequality-innovation space.

This paper studies the glass ceiling by analyzing the presence of women at the top of the income distribution using tax record data reported for a sample of countries with individual taxation.

Using a sample of U.S. firms spanning 2001-2011, we examine whether female directors (female audit committee members) affect audit quality in terms of audit effort and auditor choice.

This paper presents a theory of pseudo-wealth in a model that displays aggregate demand externalities.