This paper explores changes in the relationship betweenrace, income, and criminal victimization over time. Interestin this question is motivated by the widening incomedistribution of the last two decades. Between 1980 and1994, the share of income earned by the top 5 percentof American families...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...

Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson (2002) have claimed that the world incomedistribution underwent a "Reversal of Fortune" from 1500 to the present, wherebyformerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became poor whilepoor ones grew rich. We question their analysis with regard to both...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions;goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriatein the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based onthe EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

The rise of populism challenges numerous Western democracies and their institutions. In this round-up, we examine economic and societal conditions that are driving forces behind populism. We focus on five domains that are closely interlinked with populist support: globalization, financial...

This paper develops a novel axiomatic analysis of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour, derives an empirical exploitation index at the individual level, and provides the first estimation of the distribution of exploitation in the US in 1975-2022. We show that, among possible...