Since 2001, an increasing income inequality can be observed in most EU Member States. On aggregate level, this development is not reflected by statistics. They indicate growing average wages in real terms. Detailed statistics on average wages of different income classes reveal a tendency of...

Essay 1: We reexamine the effect of economic development on the level of democracy based on the data sets of Acemoglu et al. (2008) with a novel regression specification utilizing a zero-one-inflated beta distribution for the response variable democracy. Contrary to the results of Acemoglu et...