Examinando por Materia "Income Inequality"

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    Ítem
    Absolute Inequality and Violent Property Crime
    (Universidad EAFIT, 2016-08-22) Goda, Thomas; Torres, Alejandro; tgoda@eafit.edu.co; atorres7@eafit.edu.co
    Rational choice models argue that income inequality leads to a higher expected utility of crime and thus generates incentives to engage in illegal activities. Yet, the results of empirical studies do not provide strong support for this theory; in fact, Neumayer provides apparently strong evidence that income inequality is not a significant determinant of violent property crime rates when a representative sample is used and country specific fixed effects are controlled for. An important limitation of this and other empirical studies on the subject is that they only consider proportional income differences, even though in rational choice models absolute difference in legal and illegal incomes determine the expected utility of crime. Using the same methodology and data as Neumayer, but using absolute inequality measures rather than proportional ones, this paper finds that absolute income inequality is a statistically significant determinant of robbery and violent theft rates. This result is robust to changes in sample size and to different absolute inequality measures, which not only implies that inequality is an important correlate of violent property crime rates but also suggests that absolute measures are preferable when the impact of inequality on property crime is studied.
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    The effect of social spending on income inequality: An analysis for Latin American countries.
    (2010-05-18) Ospina, Monica
    Using a panel dataset from 1980 to 2000 this paper analyzes the determinants of income inequality in Latin American countries with special attention paid to education, health, and social security expenditures. I build on previous research by solving for the endogeneity of the social spending variables in the income inequality equation. This study undertakes 2SLS and GMM methods in order to control for the correlation of some of the regressors with the disturbance term. While government expenditure affects inequality, an increase in inequality may be related to social, economic and political changes that can also affect government expenditures. Therefore, social spending is potentially endogenous in the inequality regression and, unless this source of endogeneity is accounted for, the estimated parameters will be not consistent. Results show that social spending variables are endogenous with income inequality index. Once endogeneity is controlled for, education and health expenditures have a negative effect on income inequality, while social security expenditures have no effect on income inequality. I also find that models that do not take into account endogeneity of social spending variables overestimate the effects of education and health spending.