Home » JEL Codes » D » D7 » D74

Category Archives: D74

The Pen or the Sword: Determining the Effects of Different Types of Coups D’état on Income Inequality

By Jie Wei Chia

Existing literature on the relationship between income inequality and coup d’états focus on how the former cause the latter. No research has yet been done on how coup d’états affect income inequality after their occurrence. This study uses crosscountry panel data and fixed effects with instrumental variables models to examine the impact of successful armed coups, successful unarmed coups, failed armed coups and failed unarmed coups. I find that, on average, none of these coups have a significant impact on the Gini coefficient and the income share of the poorest quintile of a population relative to the richest quintile, save for successful armed coups when the subsample of data from 19912013 was used.

View Thesis

Advisor: Duncan Thomas, Timur Kuran | JEL Codes: D7, D74 | Tagged: Coups, Inequality, Political Economy

Faith in the Future and Social Conflict: Economic Growth as a Mechanism for Political Stabilization

By Alexander Bloedel

This paper studies the mechanisms that link sociopolitical conflict and (expectations about) economic prosperity. Motivated by a large body of empirical and historical work on the correlation between economic development and democratization, I develop a game-theoretic model of economic growth with political economy constraints. In an economy where low income agents are credit constrained, rapid and robust economic growth leads to increasing inequality early on, but provides the means to mitigate civil conflict when inequality becomes suciently large. The rate and persistence of growth similarly determines the stability of extant political institutions and the ability to transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Honors Thesis

Advisor: Curtis Taylor | JEL Codes: D72, D74, O11, O43 | Tagged: Civil Conflict, Economic Growth, Expectations, Political Economy

Questions?

Undergraduate Program Assistant
Matthew Eggleston
dus_asst@econ.duke.edu

Director of the Honors Program
Michelle P. Connolly
michelle.connolly@duke.edu