Publication

This publication tests whether centralized wage bargaining and government partisanship are correlated with differences in income inequality between advanced industrial countries, using empirical data for nearly the entire 20th century. The authors find no support for such a correlation, and their results suggest that there were alternative institutional paths to reduced income inequality during most of the century. According to them, commonly shared economic and political events such as world wars and economic crises, may ultimately be more important for understanding the evolution of income inequality than are the institutional or partisan characteristics commonly thought to be decisive.