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Mounting evidences are being gathered suggesting that income and wealth distribution in various countries or societies follow a robust pattern, close to the Gibbs distribution of energy in an ideal gas in equilibrium, but also deviating…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
We derive the most probable distribution of resources for a simple society. We find that a probabilistic analysis forbids both too much and too less equity, and selects instead a minimally ordered state. We give the detailed calculations…
Identifying and addressing poverty is challenging in administrative units with limited information on income distribution and well-being. To overcome this obstacle, small area estimation methods have been developed to provide reliable and…
In the context of a large class of stochastic processes used to describe the dynamics of wealth growth, we prove a set of inequalities establishing necessary and sufficient conditions in order to avoid infinite wealth concentration. These…
We investigate the dynamics of wealth inequality in an economy where households have positional preferences, with the strength of the positional concern determined endogenously by inequality of wealth distribution in the society. We…
I propose a new conceptual framework to disentangle the impacts of weather and climate on economic activity and growth: A stochastic frontier model with climate in the production frontier and weather shocks as a source of inefficiency. I…
Environmental variability greatly influences the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a population, i.e. it affects how its size and composition evolve. Here, we study a well-mixed population of finite and fluctuating size whose growth is limited…
Unemployment insurance transfers should balance the provision of consumption to the unemployed with the disincentive effects on the search behavior. Developing countries face the additional challenge of informality. Workers can choose to…
Climate-driven flood risk increasingly necessitates managed retreat through government buyout programmes, yet empirical evidence documents substantial racial and economic disparities in programme implementation. Here we develop a…
Understanding the causes and effects of spatial vegetation patterns is a fundamental problem in ecology, especially because these can be used as early predictors of catastrophic shifts such as desertification processes. Empirical studies of…
The stabilizing effects of local enrichment are revisited. Diffusively coupled host-parasitoid and predator-prey metapopulations are shown to admit a stable fixed point, limit cycle or stable torus with a rich bifurcation structure. A…
We study the distributional implications of uncertainty shocks by developing a model that links macroeconomic aggregates to the US distribution of earnings and consumption. We find that: initially, the fraction of low-earning workers…
There is, among the economist ecosystem, the idea of virtuous public spending as a form of promotion of economic growth. If we think on the way GDP is measured, it is not possible to get that conclusion because it becomes circular:…
We show insurmountable contradictions which arise if statistical ensembles are considered a consequence of the influence of the environment of the physical systems. We regard the multiplicity of states with a definite energy value as a…
We study how firm heterogeneity and market power affect macroeconomic fragility, defined as the probability of long slumps. We propose a theory in which the positive interaction between firm entry, competition and factor supply can give…
Using state-of-the-art techniques in computer vision, we analyze one million satellite images covering 12% of the African continent between 1984 and 2019 to track local development around 1,658 mineral deposits. We use stacked event studies…
For Adam Smith, wealth was related to the division of labor. As people and firms specialize in different activities, economic efficiency increases, suggesting that development is associated with an increase in the number of individual…
This paper proposes a model of tax compliance and fiscal capacity grounded in universalization reasoning. Citizens partially internalize the consequences of concealment by imagining a world in which everyone acted similarly, linking their…
This paper investigates the inter-regional intra-industry disparity within selected Indian manufacturing industries and industrial states. The study uses three measures - the Output-Capital Ratio, the Capital-Labor Ratio, and the…