The aim of this country report for Greece is to present and examine key patterns and trends in the inequality ‘drivers’, highlight their potential impacts in the social, political and cultural spheres and the available evidence in that regard, and point to the role that various interest...

Received wisdom suggests that 'excessive' wages, defined as the part of real wages that do not follow labour productivity developments, are adversely associated with the return on capital. This paper argues that excessive wages and profits are better thought of as responses to changes in the...

In this paper we assess the empirical importance of changes in inequality on the demand for imports by examining panel data for 59 developing and developed countries for the 1970-1997 period. We find significant evidence supporting that inequality has a large influence on the demand for imports....

In this paper we re-examine the Feldstein-Horioka finding of limited international capital mobility by using a broader view (i.e. including human capital) of investment and saving. We find that the decline in the economic significance of the Feldstein-Horioka result, found in studies using more...

The relationship between inequality and redistribution is usually studied under the assumption that the government collects different amounts of taxes from each citizen (voter) but gives back the same amount (in cash or in kind) to everyone. In this paper we consider what happens if the...

We describe the political-economic environment that precipitated the Greek crisis. Involved were nocuous collaborations between private interests and the formally appointed custodians of the public interest, and a captured politicized bureaucracy. The confluence of these forces aided in the...

Casual empiricism suggests that “unwarranted” wage changes, defined as the part of wage growth that is not explained by changes in labour productivity, are negatively associated with the return on capital. The main point of this paper is to show that “unwarranted” wage changes have no...

In this paper we investigate the empirical importance of changes in inequality on the demand for imports by examining US data from 1948 to 2007. We find evidence of a long-run relationship of a standard imports equation including income inequality. The existence of a cointegrating equation in...

We describe the political-economic environment that precipitated the Greek crisis. Involved were collaborations between private interests and the formally elected and appointed custodians of the public interest, and a captured politicized government bureaucracy. The confluence of these forces...

In this paper we uncover the existence of a U-shaped relationship between inequality and the relative reliance on tariff revenue, by estimating a cross-sectional regression relating the ratio of the tariff rate over the tax rate to inequality and a set of control variables such as GDP per...