Journal: The Journal of Economic Inequality

Abbreviation

J Econ Inequal

Publisher

Springer

Journal Volumes

ISSN

1573-8701
1569-1721

Description

Filters

2020 - 20253
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Publications 1 - 3 of 3
  • Central bank independence, income inequality and poverty: What do the data say?
    Item type: Journal Article
    Sturm, Jan-Egbert; Bodea, Cristina; de Haan, Jakob; et al. (2025)
    The Journal of Economic Inequality
    This paper examines whether the independence of central banks is related to income inequality and poverty. Following the 2008 financial crisis, independent central banks have been criticized that their actions contribute to an unequal income distribution. Yet, the case can also be made that such independence is orthogonal to income inequality or can even help mitigate it. As proxies for inequality, we employ five-year averages of the Gini coefficient and the poverty gap. Our database consists of a large set of countries, covering a long period. Our fixed effects panel estimates suggest that-despite many claims to the contrary-there is neither a robust relationship between central bank independence and the Gini coefficient nor between independence and the poverty gap. Several robustness checks (using alternative proxies for income inequality and central bank independence, interaction effects, quantile and cross-section regressions) confirm our finding.
  • Ancestral Ways of Life and Human Capital Formation in Kenya
    Item type: Journal Article
    Wüpper, David Johannes; Lang, Hannes; Benjamin, Emmanuel (2020)
    The Journal of Economic Inequality
    There is a rich literature on the importance of historical agriculture as long-term shaper of culture, institutions, and economic development. How much this changes over time, however, we understand much less. In Kenya, we compare the educational attainment between individuals with nomadic and non-nomadic ancestors over time and find a large and quite persistent gap in all periods that we examine (2006, 2009, 2013, 2016) as well as in different age cohorts. We find an especially large gap for individuals with nomadic ancestors who live in rural areas and who are women. In urban areas, we also do find evidence for some, recent improvement, but only when we restrict the comparison group to individuals from other non-English and non-Swahili speaking ethnicities. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
  • Local inequality and crime: New evidence from South Africa
    Item type: Journal Article
    Büttner, Nicolas (2025)
    The Journal of Economic Inequality
    This paper investigates the relationship between socio-economic inequalities of various dimensions and crime at the local level in South Africa. It uses a novel panel dataset of police precincts that combines crime records from the South African Police Service with socio-economic data from two population censuses and household surveys. The identification exploits variation of inequality and crime across time and space, controlling for socio-economic and demographic characteristics of police precincts, province-specific time trends, police cluster-fixed effects, and spatial correlations. I find robust evidence for a significant, positive, and linear relationship between income inequality within precincts and local rates of violent crime, and an inverted u-shaped relationship with property crime. Education and housing inequality and racial heterogeneity are also positively correlated with crime. While inter-racial inequality contributes more to property crime, intra-racial inequality contributes more to violent crime. Richer precincts display higher property crime rates as compared to their poorer neighbors.
Publications 1 - 3 of 3