Long-run effects of democracy on income inequality in Latin America

Carlos Balcazar

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2016, vol. 14, issue 3, No 3, 289-307

Abstract: Abstract I address the link between democracy and inequality in Latin America, analyzing whether the degree of democracy that birth cohorts experience during the course of their formative years is related to labor income dispersion later, in adulthood. For this, I measure inequality at the cohort level by using pseudo-panel data built from household surveys for fifteen Latin American countries (from circa 1995 to circa 2011) and measure democracy as the discounted cumulative value of the degree of democracy during the cohort’s formative years. I find that cohorts that have higher discounted cumulative values of the degree of democracy show lower income inequality. However, the effect of democracy on income dispersion is driven by those cohorts that benefited from the surge of democracies that came to exist during the second half of the twentieth century. I also present suggestive evidence that education is one mechanism explaining these results.

Keywords: Inequality; Democracy; Latin America; Pseudo panel (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10888-016-9329-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Long-run effects of democracy on income inequality in Latin America (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jecinq:v:14:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s10888-016-9329-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10888/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10888-016-9329-3

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Economic Inequality is currently edited by Stephen Jenkins

More articles in The Journal of Economic Inequality from Springer, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().