We develop and implement a method for measuring the frequency of changes in power among distinct leaders and ideologically distinct parties that is comparable across political systems. We find that more frequent alternation in power is associated with the emergence of better governance in...

Was the Euro-Mediterranean region at the time of the Roman empire and its Western successor states, more unequal than the European Union is today? We use some scant evidence on personal income distribution within the Empire and differences in average regional incomes to conclude that the Empire...

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st century" may be one of the most important recent economics books. It jointly treats theory of growth, functional distribution of income, and interpersonal income inequality. It envisages a future of relatively slow growth with the rising share of capital...

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...

Global inequality between world citizens, using the new PPP data (just published as part of the 2005 ICP), is estimated to be about 70 Gini points. This is some 4-5 Gini points higher than previously thought. The increases are even greater if one uses the Theil index.

Piketty's rg implies an increase in capital-output ratio and in the share of capital income in net output. But it still does not guarantee the increase in personal income inequality. We derive the conditions for the "pass-through" from the rise in the share of capital income to greater personal...

Using for the first time survey data from 26 post-Communist countries, covering the period 1990-2005, the paper examines correlates of unprecedented increases in inequality registered by most of these economies. We find that, after controlling for country-fixed effects and type of survey used,...

Using the newly expanded set of 40 social tables from pre-modern societies, the paper tries to find out the factors associated with the level of inequality and the inequality extraction ratio (how close to the maximum inequality have the elites pushed the actual inequality). We find strong...

The US has exceptionally high inequality of disposable household income. Among working-age households (those with no persons over age 60), that high level of inequality is caused by a high level of market income inequality (i.e., income before taxes and transfers), paired with a moderate level...

The reformulation of the median voter hypothesis and its testing proposed in Milanovic (2000) has been criticized from four different perspectives. The critiques are discussed and assessed.