Do markets generate a “just” wage? The answer to this question will depend upon the particular theory of the market that the political economist employs. By comparing actual labor markets with the neoclassical theory of competitive equilibrium as its normative benchmark, Joseph Heath (2018)...

We argue in this chapter that the transformation in the vision of economics from one in terms of processes to one in terms of equilibrium would in turn yielded public policy implications regarding the role of government and distributive justice. Although classical political economists had made a...

Does a country's level of inequality affect its ability to win Olympic medals? If it does, is it conditional on institutional factors? We argue that the ability of economically free societies to win medals will not be affected by inequality. In these societies, institutions generate incentives...

Long term measures of income inequality must grapple with the challenges presented by incomplete historical records. In this paper we examine one such problem affecting the quality of federal income tax return data in the period between the two World Wars, which form the basis for the widely...

Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada’s longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the...

We present a new series for top income concentrations in the United States, using a consistent data construction methodology for the entire range of available data. This is meant to connect efforts that have separately considered pre-1960 and post-1960 inequality measures. Our series improves...