This paper studies the influence of interregional inequality within countries on internal conflicts. Regional inequalities are measured by the population-weighted coefficient of variation of regional GDP per capita. As the main innovation, I use a panel data set of country-level regional...

The Ramsey rule for the consumption rate of discount assumes a transfer of money of a (representative) agent at one point in time to the same agent at another point in time. Climate policy (implicitly) transfers money not just over time but also between agents. I propose three alternative...

Awards are widespread in all countries and are prevalent both in the public sphere and in the private sector. This paper argues, and empirically supports, that awards serve public functions and economists should take them seriously. Using a unique cross-country data set, we suggest that awards...

We use a new dataset on non-resource GDP to examine the impact of commodity price volatility on economic growth in a panel of up to 158 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main finding is that commodity price volatility leads to a significant increase in non-resource GDP growth in...

We examine how trade openness influences income inequality within countries. The sample includes 139 countries over the period 1970-2014. We employ predicted openness as instrument to deal with the endogeneity of trade openness. The effect of trade openness on income inequality differs across...

There is abundant evidence on individual preferences for policies that reduce national inequality, but only little evidence on preferences for policies addressing global inequality. To investigate the latter, we conduct a two-year, face-to-face survey experiment on a representative sample of...

Within the fundamental determinants of cross-country income inequality, "humanly devised" political institutions represent a hallmark factor that societies can influence, as opposed to, for example, geography. Focusing on the portion of inequality explainable by differences in political...

This paper constructs a simple theoretical model to study the implications of globalization for inequality and redistribution. It shows that when globalization increases inequality, a policymaker interested in maximizing the sum of welfares of all agents increases redistribution. Empirically,...

We use several well-being measures that combine average income with a measure of inequality to undertake international, intertemporal, and global comparisons of well-being. The conclusions emerging from the analysis are that our well-being measures drastically change our impression of levels of...

The internet has given birth to an expanding number of shared virtual reality spaces, with a collective population well into the millions. These virtual worlds exhibit most of the traits we associate with the Earth world: economic transactions, interpersonal relationships, organic political...