1,720,967 research outputs found
Empirics of the median voter : democracy, redistribution and the role of the middle class
No full textThe present paper improves the empirical investigation on the effectiveness of the median voter theorem. Using high quality data, it is possible to directly observe net cash transfers for every individual and to investigate the effects of taxes and transfers on different classes. Results suggest to reject - or at least question - the hypothesis that the middle class plays a special role in the policy determination. Not only its gains from redistribution are negligible, but the link between income and redistribution is lower than for any other class of income. Moreover, the strength of the median voter seems to reduce over time. Finally, more asymmetric societies decrease the amount of redistribution targeted to the middle class, a result in strong contrast to the median voter theorem, since - according to it - the middle class should have incentives to expropriate richest individual
Expansion of schooling and educational inequality in Europe: the educational Kuznets curve revisited
No full textThis article analyses the relationship between schooling expansion and educational inequality in a panel of developed countries over different birth cohorts. We extend previous literature by exploiting the longitudinal dimension of our data and by focussing on different measures of inequality. Using either a Gini or a Theil measure of inequality, we find evidence that at higher average levels of education further increases are associated with rising inequality. The inverted-U Kuznets curve appears to depend on using the standard deviation as the measure of inequality. We also discuss how educational policies may influence educational inequality and find that the length of compulsory education affects inequality only through its effect on average education, whilst school tracking shapes inequality independently of the level of education. © Oxford University Press 2013. All rights reserved
La diseguaglianza dei redditi in Italia
No full textThe evolution of income inequality in Italy is different from most of other countries: the Gini coefficient of total equivalised income declined gradually until the late 1980s, grew suddenly during the 1991-1992 recession and remained approximately stable thereafter. In this paper we attempt to explain this trend reversal. We analyse the contribution of the changing distribution of individual incomes by main factor sources (labour income, self employment income, pensions) and by region of origin (North, Centre, South).
We find that pension income and labour income had opposite effects on inequality: changes in the distribution of pension income had an equalising effect while changes in the distribution of labour income and self employment income tended to increase overall income inequality
Education, inequality and electoral participation
No full textIn comparative terms, Italian electoral turnout has been very high since 1946. However, during the five elections from 1994 to 2008,turnout dropped more steeply than it did over the previous 12 elections from 1946 to 1992.The difference between maximum turnout in the early 1950s and the 2008 election was about 12%,and mostof this decline (8%) occurred in the period 1992-2008.This paper finds robust evidence that individual and contextual social inequalities have been key factors i therecent fall of turnout.In particular our results clearly suggest that contextual social inequality lowers the turnout of less-educated voters and leaves it unafectedamong high-educated ones. The recent decline in turnout may therefore be indicative of an important shift towards more unequal political participation. These findings are consistent with data showing that the post-1994 parties performed very poorly as mobilisation agencies compared with the old parties.Indeed, according to Franklin (2004), turnout trends can be effectively explained by changes in institutional rules and by the degree of electoral competitiveness.This paper suggests that, in order to explain turnout trends, the interactive effects of social and individual inequality should also be considered
A new dataset on educational inequality
No full textThis paper describes a new dataset, in which measures of educational level and inequality were collected for 48 countries over 13 5-year birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international surveys (ess, eu-silc, ials and issp), we collected measures of individual educational attainment and aggregated them to generate synthetic indices of educational level and dispersion by countries and birth cohorts. The paper provides a detailed description of the procedures and methodologies adopted to build the new dataset, analyses the validity and consistency of the measures across surveys and discusses the relevance of these data for future research. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
A new dataset on educational inequality
Full text linkThis paper describes a new dataset collecting measures of educational level and inequality for 31 countries over several birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international datasets (ess, eu-silc, ials and issp), we collect measures of individual educational attainment and aggregate them to generate synthetic indices of education level and dispersion by countries and birth cohorts. The paper provides a detailed description of the procedures and methodologies adopted to build the new dataset, analyses the validity and consistency of the measures across surveys and discusses the relevance of these data for future research.
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