Who drives social change - the people or activist elites? While progressive reforms are often championed by elites, their preferences may diverge from those of the broader group they aim to represent, producing unintended political consequences. We study this dynamic in the context of female...

Rising wealth inequality is both a topic in recent policy discussion and in the social sciences. Despite the general interest in wealth concentration, we know only little about the largest privately held fortunes. To help fill this gap we analyze the historical origins of Germany's 1,032 largest...

Die zunehmende Vermögensungleichheit wird sowohl in aktuellen politischen Debatten als auch in den Sozialwissenschaften diskutiert. Trotz des breiten Interesses an der Vermögenskonzentration wissen wir bislang jedoch nur wenig über die größten Privatvermögen. Daher untersuchen wir die...

The increasing concentration of income and wealth on the national and international level is a topic that has received increased attention both in social science research as well as public policy debates. While data availability is a well-known and often-lamented problem in wealth studies,...

Economic inequality remains a persistent and widely studied issue in the social sciences. South Korea provides a striking example where the top 23 business groups, controlled by ultra-wealthy, family-owned conglomerates (chaebols), have maintained significant economic persistence and resisted...

Who drives social change—the people or activist elites? While progressive reforms are often championed by elites, their preferences may diverge from those of the broader group they aim to represent, producing unintended political consequences. We study this dynamic in the context of female...

In the 1960s and 1970s elite studies formed an integral part of the research agenda on newly independent African states. Commentators sought to predict the likely political and economic paths of independent African states based on the social backgrounds and political orientations of existing...

Drawing on the pragmatic turn in contemporary social theory, we explore how corporate elites accused of corruption in the context of weak institutions engage in their justification works. Empirically, we focus on three high-profile corruption scandals that shook Ghana between 2010 and 2020 and...

This thesis investigates the influence of elite supervisory board members on the performance of German firms. Following the transformation of the German business landscape post-reunification, elite board members, characterized by their exceptional social capital, continue to play a crucial role....

We analyze how a permanent shift in political power in a region that is creative a la Richard Florida affects tax policy and economic outcomes. There are three groups of individuals in our region: laborers or workers, creative class members or entrepreneurs, and the elites. The elites initially...

Elites disproportionately influence policymaking, yet little is known about their fairness and efficiency preferences - key determinants of support for redistributive policies. We investigate these preferences using an incentivized lab experiment with a group of future elites - Ivy League MBA...

Der Beitrag untersucht die Selbstinszenierungen und Deutungsmuster der weiblichen Wirtschaftselite. Die empirische Datengrundlage bilden aktuelle deutschsprachige Autobiographien erfolgreicher Spitzenmanagerinnen und Unternehmerinnen. Der Fokus liegt auf der Wirtschaftselite, da diese als...

This comparative study explores the consumption practices and systems of supply of elite families in England and Germany from the middle of the eighteenth into the early nineteenth century. The paper focuses on three key elements of elite consumption - silverware, livery, and wine - to tease out...

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to investigate the position of religion for the three constitutions of Egypt. Design/methodology/approach - In this study, by tracing religious identity-related studies and seeing whether their existence is attributed to the ruling elites' attitudes, it...

How do firms employ political connections to deal with their non-market environment? To answer this question, we provide the most comprehensive empirical examination of firms' employment of former public officials -revolvers- to date. Building on a rich literature in management and political...

Mozambique is becoming recognised as an emerging hub for cocaine trafficking, with links stretching back to Brazil. The arrest of a well-known associate of Brazil's Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) suggests the emergence of a new 'lusophone route' driven by the group. Mozambique's connection to...

This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the...

This paper leverages a novel panel dataset covering the histories of 306 chiefs and 256 episodes of village governance and taxation by armed groups in 106 villages in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in order to analyse the relationship between the governance of armed groups and the...

The existing literature on finance, debt and inequality depicts economic elites as a creditor class. According to a popular thesis, over the past four decades, the rich and ultra-rich households in the top 1 percent have experienced a saving glut (excess income), which they have invested in the...

Bai et al. (2023) examine the impact of individual networks on state building, focusing on the role of the leader Zeng Guofan during the Taiping Revolution in China between 1850 and 1864. In their main results, the authors demonstrate that being connected to Zeng increases the number of...

We study the effect of political regime change on higher education and its distributional and political consequences. We focus on the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. The Pinochet dictatorship's aims of political control and fiscal conservatism led to a large reduction...