"The fundamental question of political theory, one which precedes all other questions about the nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. Is human cooperation feasible without a political authority enforcing it? Or do we need a state to live together? This question also reveals...

After reviewing the current literature on the causes of economic inequality, the article models the historical emergence of inequality as the result of a key technological change (i.e., the adoption of agriculture) that widened income differentials and led to the construction of state...

Spain stands as one of the few countries in the world which have completed a successful transition from authoritarianism and relative underdevelopment to democracy and economic abundance in the last half century. This paper explores the nature and causes of the economic underdevelopment of Spain...

This paper studies the dynamic relationship between distribution and endogenous growth in an overlapping generations model with accumulation of human and physical capital. It is shown how human capital can determine a relationship between per capita growth rates and inequality in the...

We study the earnings structure and the equilibrium assignment of workers when workers exert intra-firm spillovers on each other. We allow for arbitrary spillovers provided output depends on some aggregate index of workers' skill. Despite the possibility of increasing returns to skills,...