The paper uses the data from Francois Quesnay's writings to derive a social table for pre-revolutionary France, estimate country's mean income and income distribution. These Quesnay-based estimates are compared with more recent estimates of 18th century French incomes and inequality

This Article retells the story of “The Family Assistance Act of 1970." Had this historic bill been enacted into law, it would have provided every poor family with children a guaranteed minimum income. Although this measure had the support of the president and passed the House in April 1970 by...

Professor Hsu demonstrates how law can operate to exacerbate the growth of capital over general economic growth. The point of this essay is to show that sometimes those laws are the result of intentional discrimination because of race

In the ten years 1953-62, the average price level in Italy rose every year, with the exception of 1959. The present article examines the effects of this inflationary process on income distribution. To do so the author first determines the extent to which each productive sector contributed to the...

This paper is essentially autobiographical and describes Erik Thorbecke's journey through the history of development economics between the 1950s and the present. The paper consists of four parts. First, an introduction reviews briefly his professional career as a development economist and his...

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand earnings distribution. In the years since Mincer's seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole array of observations pertaining...

Luigi Pasinetti’s work has deeply affected modern economic theory. His papers on the Cambridge Capital Controversy are world renowned. But he has made many other contributions to the economic debates of the last half century, offering not only detailed criticisms of mainstream economic theory,...

Economic disruption in East Germany at the time of unification resulted in a noticeable drop in life satisfaction. By the late 1990s East Germany's life satisfaction had recovered to about its 1990 level, and its shortfall relative to West Germany was slightly less than that before unification....

This paper analyzes the relationship between income distribution and individual wellbeing levels based upon the happiness levels reported by individuals in the Latinobarometro survey 2008. The main contribution of this paper is to study not only the direct effects of the economic performance...

The paper continues the author's work on a general theory for the aggregation of prices and quantities in relation to the money metric. The focus here is on the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs). It is shown that the measures that are currently being produced are seriously defective....