What was the impact of urban political structure on economic inequality in preindustrial times? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher economic inequality in a panel of early modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that...

The threat of revolution disciplines the elites, inducing them to strategically share some of their wealth in order to prevent social unrest. This behavioral conjecture is prominently used to explain franchise extension and welfare state expansion. We test this conjecture in a controlled...

An increasing number of countries are setting up policy programs to attract talented expats to return. Can such programs help reverse the brain drain of elite scientists from developing countries to the developed world? Will they facilitate or hinder returnee scientists’ knowledge...

This paper analyzes how changes in the concentration of political power affect long-run development. We study Brazil’s military dictatorship whose rise to power dramatically altered the distribution of power of local political elites. We document that municipalities that were more politically...

A large and growing literature focuses on the causal impacts of elite education on students’ academic outcomes. Yet, current conclusions are contentious. To understand the heterogeneous impacts of elite education, this study proposes a conceptual framework with individual heterogeneity in...

The Elite Quality Index for 2022 (EQx2022) is the third annual publication of the internationally comparative ranking of countries on ‘elite quality’. Its aim is to provide a unique dataset for academic research, original insight on the human and economic development trajectories of nations...

Whether elite universities expand or limit upward mobility in the long run depends on how they shape the intergenerational transmission of educational and social outcomes. We combine five decades of linked data on social and educational trajectories for parents and children in Chile with a...

An economic elite wants to buy a public asset as cheaply as possible. Its ownership is decided by an incumbent politician who can be of high or low competence. The elite can make a buying offer for the asset and manipulate the information that is available to voters about the incumbent’s...

Before the middle of the nineteenth century most laws enacted in the United States were special bills that granted favors to specific individuals, groups, or localities. This fundamentally inegalitarian system provided political elites with important tools that they could use to reward...

A significant part of economic coercion deployed by the US, EU and the UN targets authoritarian regimes' ruling elites, and aims to promote liberalization by encouraging defections and discouraging repression. We develop a model to study the effects of such measures. The ruler chooses how much...

In this research, we emphasize the importance of studying the gap in redistributive preference between political elites and the public because of the strategic roles played by the former in policy processes. We use China as a case study, wherein the fulfillment of surging demands for...

This paper replicates a classic study of the American business elite. The older study done a half-century ago, reported the composition of business leaders a century ago. I have" drawn a sample of business leaders today to discover how much the composition of the" American business elite has...

This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). I web scraped a unique dataset that contains detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders operating in 15 countries of the (former) Soviet Union at some point between 1916 and 2017. Using this data, I...

Using a database of 189,000+ Colombian firms, I study the effect of CEOs' centrality and political connections on access to PAEF ("Programa de Apoyo al Empleo Formal"), a government bailouts program launched to subsidy wages in the first stages of COVID-19 crisis, and the ex-post economic...

The article designs and tests a framework which grasps ideological divergences among the Russian elite by focusing on Radical Statism (Radical Gosudarstvennichestvo) and contrasting it with Radical Civicism. In order to operationalize this distinction, the study develops lists of particular...

We construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The...

Elite college attendance significantly impacts students' entrepreneurship decisions and career dynamics. We find that an elite college degree is positively correlated with entrepreneurship (i.e., owning an incorporated business) but not with other self-employment forms. Our overlapping...

Elite college attendance significantly impacts students' entrepreneurship decisions and career dynamics. We find that an elite college degree is positively correlated with entrepreneurship (i.e., owning an incorporated business) but not with other self-employment forms. Our overlapping...

Elite skills have become crucial in today’s superstar economy. We develop a multi-period skillformation model where we show that individuals with temporary disadvantages must exert greater effort to gain access to elite education. This “underdog-incentive effect” implies that “educated...

This paper shows that the design of education policy involves a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. We consider a setting in which social mobility is maximized under the least elitist public education system, whereas welfare maximization calls for the most elitist system. We...

Inter- and intra-state disparities in levels of literacy rates in India are striking, especially for the marginalized groups of women and low caste population. The present paper offers an explanation of this disparate development in terms of elite dominance that discriminates against the...

While there is evidence of a substantial and rising labor market premium associated with college attendance, little is known about how this premium varies across institutions of different quality and across time. Previous research which has estimated the return to college quality has not taken...

In the context of strikingly low literacy rates among Indian women and low caste population, the paper explores whether and how far the interests of the marginalized poor are undermined by the dominant elite consisting mainly of the landed and the capitalists. We distinguish the dominant elite...

I study a model where Information Technology, while typically increasing overall inequality, is likely to harm some people at intermediate and high levels of the distribution of income but to benefit people at the bottom. Within a given occupation it may harm some workers while benefitting...

This paper develops a model in which the interaction of entrepreneurial investments and power of the owners of land or other natural resources determines structural change and economic development. A more equal distribution of natural resources promotes structural change and growth through two...

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of recruitment of elites and to investigate the nature of the links between recruitment of elites and economic growth. The main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their...

This paper analyses the pre-tax inequality in the income that individuals actually receive in Brazil and the role of the personal income tax in regulating these incomes. We produce a new distributional series of fiscal income, consistently combining annual and nationally representative household...

Elite occupations are characterised by the magnitude of income accumulation which has been particularly exacerbated in the financialisation process. This paper however shows that the cumulative effects on group earnings is a pattern visible across the labour force. The case studies on the US and...

Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, we study the evolving isolation of higher earners from other employees in eleven countries: Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Spain, South Korea, and Sweden. We find in almost all countries a...

This paper studies the effects of enrollment in an elite school on students’ achievement. We use that elite schools in Amsterdam are often oversubscribed and admission is based on lotteries. Our results show that elite schools have negative effects on achievement of students who just...

This paper exploits an original database that spans 30-plus developed and developing nations between 1870 and 2010 to perform the first empirical analysis of the relationship between historical levels of intra-elite competition and fiscal development over the long run. We argue that the timing...

This article analyses the increasing socio-economic segmentation of rural society in Northern Italy in the early modern era. With a synthesis of the historiography on the Italian countryside plus original archival research, we reconstruct the political role and the socioeconomic basis of rural...

Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, we study the evolving isolation of higher earners from other employees in eleven countries: Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Spain, South Korea, and Sweden. We find in almost all countries a...