Income Distribution Commons^™

Economic Wealth And Social Welfare: A Longitudinal Analysis Of Transnational Well-Being, Kelly Brooke Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

Macro changes in the financial arena have prompted ongoing research focused on global economic trends. As America emerges from an era of stagnant wages, rising unemployment, and growing class stratification it is necessary to explore differences in cross-national socioeconomic behavior to address the changing needs of our country. Many studies attempt to describe statistical correlations between economic wealth and social well-being domestically and abroad by utilizing methodological perspectives that do not account for longitudinal change. To address the gap in existing research, this study seeks to measure variations in econometric indicators between the U.S. and Nordic countries to further explicate …

The Political Economy Of Environmental Justice: A Comparative Study Of New Delhi And Los Angeles, Ratik Asokan

CMC Senior Theses

Though mainstream environmentalism, both in the U.S. and India, was initially rooted in social justice, it has, over time, moved away from this focus. The Environmental Justice Movement consequently arose to reunite social and environmental activism. In this thesis, I trace the historical relationship between the mainstream environmentalism, the Environmental Justice Movement, and marginalized communities. After providing this general overview, I examine two case studies – in Los Angeles and New Delhi respectively – where marginalized communities have been involved in Environmental Justice activities. My analysis reveals that marginalized communities often act in an ‘environmentalist’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ manner, without …

La Economía Política De La Desigualdad De Ingreso En Chile, 1850-2009, Javier E. Rodríguez Weber

Javier E. Rodríguez Weber

This dissertation studies the relationship between income inequality and the development process, considered as the sum of economic, social and political changes produced over time. It does so using the case of Chile between 1850 and 2009. Its goals are to describe the tendencies in income distribution over time, and also to explain, signalling their causes and some of their consequences. In the empirical area, the main contributions of the dissertation are the estimates of historical series of salaries, wages, and different measures of income distribution –Gini index, Theil, labour share and the income of the top 1%. To make …

Challenges Of The Cooperative Movement In Addressing Issues Of Human Security In The Context Of A Neoliberal World: The Case Of Argentina, Stefan Ivanovski

Stefan Ivanovski

The response of some Argentine workers to the 2001 crisis of neoliberalism gave rise to a movement of worker-recovered enterprises (empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores or ERTs). The ERTs have emerged as former employees took over the control of generally fraudulently bankrupt factories and enterprises. The analysis of the ERT movement within the neoliberal global capitalist order will draw from William Robinson’s (2004) neo-Gramscian concept of hegemony. The theoretical framework of neo-Gramscian hegemony will be used in exposing the contradictions of capitalism on the global, national, organizational and individual scales and the effects they have on the ERT movement. The …

[Review Of The Book The Idea Of Poverty: England In The Early Industrial Age], George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] One must have some knowledge of a society's conception of poverty in order to understand the existence of differing methods of poor relief over time and place. In The Idea of Poverty, Gertrude Himmelfarb presents a detailed account of England's poverty problem during the years 1750 to 1850 as seen by contemporary English economists, politicians, journalists, and novelists. She attempts to determine why the image of poverty, and of the poor, changed over those years and how the popular image of the poor influenced society's methods of relieving poverty. The result is a book that anyone concerned with the …

The Economic Role Of The English Poor Law, 1780-1834, George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] Over the 85-year period from 1748/50 to 1832/34, real per capita expenditures on poor relief increased at an average rate of approximately 1 percent per year. There were also important changes in the administration of relief with respect to able-bodied laborers during the period. Policies providing relief outside of workhouses to unemployed and under-employed able-bodied laborers became widespread during the 1770s and 1780s in the grain-producing South and East of England. The so-called Speenhamland system of outdoor relief flourished until 1834, when it was abolished by the Poor Law Amendment Act. The aim of the thesis is to provide …

The Gettysburg Economic Review, Volume 6, Spring 2012

Gettysburg Economic Review

No abstract provided.

The Rise Of American Industrial And Financial Corporations, Elizabeth A. Laughlin

Gettysburg Economic Review

This paper identifies and analyzes the steps the United States took in its progression to an industrial nation. Launched by the merger movement in the late nineteenth century, vertical and horizontal integration lead to trusts and monopolies in a number of industries. Simultaneously, the labor market was undergoing a number of reforms with the deskilling of workers. The rise of big business was made possible through the growth of the financial sectors and companies such as J.P Morgan. The case study of The Standard Oil Co. highlights the wealth and power that robber barons such as J.D. Rockefeller held during …

Why Economic Performance Has Differed Between Brazil And China? A Comparative Analysis Of Brazilian And Chinese Macroeconomic Policy, Fernando Ferrari-Filho, Anthony Petros Spanakos

Department of Political Science and Law Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper addresses a specific question: why has China grown so rapidly and Brazil not? To answer this question, it (i) establishes the basis for comparison between China and Brazil by contextualizing these countries within the BRICs concept, and (ii) presents a comparative analysis of Brazilian and Chinese reforms focusing only on the issue of macroeconomic policy, especially the monetary and exchange rate regimes, and its effect on growth.

Commodity Exports, Invisible Exports And Terms Of Trade For The Middle Colonies, 1720 To 1775, Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas J. Weiss

Joshua L. Rosenbloom

Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes rather than considering the export sector as a whole. Here we present new comprehensive export measures for the middle colonies. We find that aggregate exports in constant prices grew very quickly, but barely faster than population during the period under consideration. Furthermore, improvements in the terms of trade increased the colonists’ ability to buy …

Credit Card Interest Rates: Does Race And Gender Matter?, Brian Hecht

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This paper examines the consumer credit card market in theUnited Statesto determine what factors, race and gender specifically, influence interest rates available to consumers. Data from the 2001 Survey of Consumer Finances is used to model the credit card market and answer the questions: All else being equal do women have higher credit card interest rates than men? Do blacks or Hispanics, all else being equal, have higher credit card interest rates than whites?

The paper provides background on the credit card market and its growing importance, reviews key literature on the role that discrimination can play in different lending …

Reexamining The Distribution Of Wealth In 1870, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Gregory W. Stutes

Joshua L. Rosenbloom

This paper uses data on real and personal property ownership collected in the 1870 Federal Census to explore factors influencing individual wealth accumulation and the aggregate distribution of wealth in the United States near the middle of the nineteenth century. Previous analyses of these data have relied on relatively small samples, or focused on population subgroups. By using the much larger sample available in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) we are able to disaggregate the data much more finely than has previously been possible allowing us to explore differences in inequality across space and between different population groups. …

Movement Of Economics Professors Among Top Research Universities In The Us, Benjamin E. Resnick

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Abstract not Included

Employer Recruitment And The Integration Of Industrial Labor Markets, 1870-1914, Joshua L. Rosenbloom

Joshua L. Rosenbloom

The substantial shifts in the sectoral and geographic location of economic activity that took place in the late nineteenth-century United States required the reallocation of large quantities of labor. This paper examines the response of labor market institutions to the challenges of unbalanced growth. Based on previously unexploited descriptive evidence from the reports of the Immigration Commission it argues that employer recruitment was crucial to the adjustment of labor markets to shifting patterns of supply and demand. Because individual employers could capture only a fraction of the benefits of recruitment, however, investment in this activity may have been less than …

Education And Living, Ralph Borsodi

School of Living Books

In Education and Living, a two-volume work, Borsodi elaborated the model of the School of Living. Most of volume one consists of a critique of “mis-education.” Most of that critique focuses on the problems of centralization; centralization of industry, the economy, politics and education. The second volume of Education and Living explains Borsodi’s vision of achieving decentralization in detail. The second volume is in two parts: Right-Education and Re-Education. It explains how to educate for the “Normal” human being and for achieving the “Normal” way of living. This is not the “normal” of the bell curve, the average of a …