Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal最新文献

{"title":"The Social Assistance System in Bulgaria","authors":"V. Terziev, M. Bogdanova, Dimitar Kanev, Marin Georgiev, Simeonov Simeon","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3477129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3477129","url":null,"abstract":"Social policy as a set of principles, legal norms, activities and institutions, aimed at creating conditions that ensure the quality of life of the citizens of a country, is an expression of the social relations between the state and its citizens. Social policy determines safety (social, health, economic) and security of the individuals in society.\u0000Keywords: social assistance, social protection, social policy.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"139 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124619228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aligned: Sex Workers’ Lessons for the Gig Economy","authors":"Yvette Butler","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3726920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3726920","url":null,"abstract":"Society’s perception of a type of work and the people who engage in money-generating activities has an impact on whether and how the law protects (or does not protect) the people who perform those activities. Work can be legitimized or delegitimized. Workers are protected or left out to dry depending upon their particular “hustle.” This Article argues that gig workers and sex workers face similar challenges within the legal system and that these groups can and should collaborate to their collective advantage when seeking reforms. Gig workers have been gaining legitimacy while sex workers still primarily operate in the shadow economy. This Article digs into the sometimes-conflicting desires of individuals working as sex workers and gig workers to inform how gig workers can achieve the power and economic independence necessary to prevent workplace exploitation.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"13 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133813412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"People, Inc.? Law, Economic Enterprise, and the Development of Inequality in China","authors":"Teemu Ruskola","doi":"10.1093/AJCL/AVZ003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/AJCL/AVZ003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This Article tells the story of two Chinas and of different forms of public enterprise associated with each: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in urban China and township-and-village enterprises (TVEs) in rural China. Historically SOEs have constituted the dominant form of socialist enterprise in China. However, China’s unprecedented economic growth began with the rise of rural industry in the 1980s, and the bulk of rural growth was generated by a new type of entity known as TVEs. While legal scholars have mostly ignored TVEs, economists have devoted a great deal of theoretical attention to them: How were TVEs able to succeed in the absence of legally protected property rights, in defiance of standard economic theory? Remarkably, they operated without a formal legal basis. This Article argues that long before the enactment of the PRC’s first Company Law in 1993, in TVEs local government law performed the core functions of corporation law—a phenomenon this Article characterizes as “Village, Inc.” It was this law of local governance, and the formal and informal institutions supporting it, that propelled China’s phenomenal growth for nearly two decades while helping close the historic welfare gap between city and country.\u0000 The Article next compares TVEs’ record of success with that of SOEs. The Company Law promulgated in 1993 marked a reorientation from rural reforms to restructuring urban SOEs. Despite its apparent novelty, in many respects the Company Law simply codified institutional arrangements pioneered by TVEs. Even after SOEs were “corporatized” in order to attract outside capital, the state remained a controlling shareholder—a configuration this Article describes as “People, Inc.” However, despite the benefit of a formally promulgated corporate statute, as a group corporatized SOEs have not been able to replicate TVEs’ extraordinary success. Beyond the Company Law’s formal structures, there has been no informal “local law” of SOEs to regulate them, equivalent to the relatively egalitarian village institutions that governed the operation of TVEs.\u0000 Significantly, however, the corporatization of SOEs has not only restructured the state’s relationship to capital. The final part of the Article considers how it has also fundamentally altered the relationship between capital and labor. The enactment of the Company Law was accompanied by the promulgation of a new Labor Law in 1994, mandating that all employees be provided with employment contracts. Since then, the revolutionary political subject of Maoism—“the people”—has been atomized into independent economic subjects responsible for their own welfare outside of work. This, in turn, has resulted in tectonic shifts in the boundaries among the state, the market, and the family. Moreover, with the contractualization of all labor, even urban workers no longer enjoy a guaranteed share of the benefits of economic development. Today, an earlier state-enforced inequality between city and country is increa","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125864577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Should Governments Tax the Rich and Subsidize the Poor? A Comparative Study of Muslim and Christian Respondents","authors":"Robert W. McGee, Serkan Benk, B. Yüzbaşı","doi":"10.3390/REL10020072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/REL10020072","url":null,"abstract":"This study used the most recent World Values Survey (WVS) dataset to determine whether Christian and Muslim views on the acceptability of taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor was an essential feature of democracy. The sample size included more than 23,000 individuals from more than 50 countries. More than a dozen socioeconomic and attitudinal variables were also examined to determine whether significant differences existed. The study found that differences in viewpoint were often significant.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122731737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cities as Drivers of Social Mobility","authors":"A. Michelangeli, Umut Türk","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3310480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3310480","url":null,"abstract":"Intergenerational mobility refers to children moving up from the social class position held by their parents. Previous studies indicate family background as one of the major determinants of socioeconomic mobility and, in general, of individual life chances. This paper extends the standard approach to measure intergenerational social mobility by examining the role of cities where offspring grew up. The idea is that cities can provide resources and opportunities able to increase the chance of employment and status attainment. We assess intergenerational mobility in Italy, the most immobile country in Europe together with Greece and Portugal. We use a data survey provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), which provides information on the individual-level track of Italian students’ life path from high school to occupation. We merge these data with city-level data on economic conditions, human capital, and social capital. We distinguish between students who attended university in the same province where they presumably grew up and those who migrated to another province for higher education. This allows us to test whether migration affects the shift in occupation type and, if so, which characteristics of cities enhance upward mobility.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"393 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122783781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Captive Audience Meetings: The Right Not to Attend","authors":"Paul M. Secunda","doi":"10.1017/9781108610070.026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610070.026","url":null,"abstract":"For nearly seventy years, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or \"Board\") and various courts have interpreted the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or \"Act\") as permitting employers to give captive audience meetings during labor organizational campaigns in the private-sector. Employees, in the midst of deciding whether to join a union, must attend such meetings where \"labor relations consultants\" usually dictate management's views about the evils of unionism. These meeting occur during working hours, when management is best situated to shackle employees through the exertion of its economic authority and to play on fears of job loss if employees vote in favor of unionization. During these meetings, employees are not permitted to question the employer representative and employers are not obligated to provide the union access to the workplace to present opposing views. While in a formal sense employees are free to leave these meetings, they do so in reality at the peril of losing their jobs. \u0000Put simply, rightfully motivated by the necessity of continued employment for basic economic survival, employees will not miss the threatening subtexts of carefully crafted message. Such messages, while free from overt statutorily prohibited threats of reprisal or promise of benefits, will nonetheless convey the detrimental effects of failing to agree with the employer's anti-union stance. Even though eventual voting on unionization will be completed by secret ballot, most employees by that point seem to lose all interest in supporting a cause that will surely draw their employer's ire. Thus, the central argument of this Chapter is that captive audience meetings are not about employer speech rights at all, but rather amount to coercive conduct against employees in derogation of employees' right to self-organization under the NLRA. Of course, employers are free to express or discuss anti-union views with their employees. However, doing so through the mechanism of forced listening, implied coercion, and fear is conduct that should be regulated under the NLRA. Utilizing the conduct/speech distinction in labor picketing law and sexual harassment law, this Chapter will establish the similar conduct-like nature of captive audience meetings and contend that the Board should make employer captive audience meetings a per se violation of Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA, as it is conduct that directly interferes with, restrains and/or intimidates employees in Section 7 organizational rights to decide whether they wish to join a union.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125607646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Impacts of Financial Literacy and Confidence on the Severity of Financial Hardship in Australia","authors":"E. Bourova, M. Anderson, I. Ramsay, P. Ali","doi":"10.14453/AABFJ.V12I4.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14453/AABFJ.V12I4.2","url":null,"abstract":"Consumers in Australia and other developed countries are increasingly required to interact with providers of complex financial products and services, and to estimate, mitigate or absorb the risks that flow from their financial decisions. A range of debt-related problems in Australia have been attributed to low levels of financial literacy in the population. However, there has been limited research exploring the relationship between low financial literacy and the problem of financial hardship, where a consumer takes on payment obligations under a contract, but then becomes unable to meet them when they fall due. Drawing on a survey of Australians who recently experienced debt problems, this article examines the impact of financial literacy levels and levels of confidence in managing day-to-day spending on the severity of financial hardship. The article also examines the impacts of financial literacy and confidence levels on the strategies employed to get by financially while in debt. The article shows that while there is no straightforward relationship between low financial literacy and severity of financial hardship, lower levels of financial literacy may reduce consumers’ ability to avoid some of the more serious consequences of default, particularly if coupled with overconfidence about their ability to manage spending.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133821801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Intellectual Property and the End of Work","authors":"C. Hrdy","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3011735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3011735","url":null,"abstract":"The conventional wisdom is that intellectual property (IP) is good for jobs. Indeed, according to legislators and the U.S. patent office, IP “creates jobs.” But this is not quite right. The purpose of IP is to increase the amount of innovation in the economy. Yet a significant subset of the innovations protected by IP, from self-service kiosks to self-driving cars, are in fact labor-saving. They reduce the amount of human labor required to complete a task. Therefore, to the extent IP is successful at incentivizing innovation, IP actually contributes to job loss. More precisely, IP contributes to what this article terms technological un/employment: job loss, and job creation, resulting from technological change. Commentators concerned about the “end of work” have suggested using taxation to slow down the pace of automation and provide aid to displaced workers. But this article yields another surprising insight: IP law itself could be designed to effectuate similar goals, either alone or in coordination with the tax system. For example, rather than taxing businesses that employ robots, legislators could deny patents on robots, or tax IP owners and use the proceeds to fund social programs like a universal basic income. IP’s relationship to technological un/employment, and the implications for public policy, seem obvious in hindsight. Yet the connection has been overlooked. Lawyers and academics who study IP must pay more attention.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115888761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Residential Segregation: The Role of Inequality and Housing Subsidies","authors":"P. Harting, D. Radi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3191791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3191791","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Residential segregation is a key public policy issue that is driven by economic factors on the one side, and individual attitudes towards ethnic diversity on the other side. We assume a modeling framework that consists of a population of two ethnic groups, a rental market for each neighborhood, and household’s utility which depends on consumption and housing. Accounting for income disparities and heterogeneous preferences for living in ethnically diverse neighborhoods, we examine the residential segregation patterns that occur when households make their neighborhood choice by taking economic and diversity related aspects into account. The investigation reveals that ethnic income disparities and heterogeneous preferences are antagonistic forces such that a certain level of income stratification is the price for residential integration. In light of these findings, we discuss to which extent and under which conditions housing subsidy policies can favor residential integration.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125761770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Income, Consumption and Wealth Inequality in Spain (La desigualdad de la renta, el consumo y la riqueza en España)","authors":"Brindusa Anghel, Henrique S. Basso, O. Bover, J. Casado, Laura Hospido, Mario Izquierdo, Iván Kataryniuk, Aitor Lacuesta, José Manuel Montero, Elena Vozmediano","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3188029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3188029","url":null,"abstract":"espanolEl documento analiza el nivel y la evolucion de la desigualdad en Espana durante la ultima crisis y la fase inicial de la actual recuperacion. Para tal fin, el trabajo introduce, inicialmente, distintas dimensiones de la desigualdad en terminos de salarios, renta, consumo y riqueza, y analiza su evolucion. Este analisis muestra una reducida dispersion salarial en Espana en relacion con otras economias de nuestro entorno incluso tras los anos de crisis, mientras que el fuerte aumento del desempleo durante ese periodo provoco una elevada desigualdad de la renta per capita. El nivel de desigualdad en Espana se modera cuando se analiza la renta bruta total del hogar. Ademas, este nivel se redujo durante la crisis como consecuencia de la evolucion positiva de las pensiones en relacion con otras fuentes de renta y al retraso en la edad de emancipacion de los jovenes. Durante la crisis, se incremento la desigualdad en el consumo per capita, sobre todo, por la caida en el gasto de bienes duraderos en los hogares con bajos ingresos. La desigualdad de la riqueza es mayor que la de la renta y se incremento durante el periodo recesivo debido al mejor comportamiento de los rendimientos de los activos financieros que al de los reales, si bien Espana presenta un grado de desigualdad de la riqueza moderado en comparacion al de otros paises ya que la tenencia de activos reales es relativamente mas generalizada que en otros paises. La evolucion de la desigualdad durante las fases iniciales de la actual recuperacion economica revela que la caida del paro ha permitido una reduccion de la desigualdad de las rentas salariales y, aunque de forma mas limitada, tambien de la renta per capita. EnglishThis document analyses the level of inequality in Spain and how it evolved over the course of the past crisis and the early stages of the current recovery. To this end, it first introduces the various dimensions of wage, income, consumption and wealth inequality, and analyses how they have developed. The analysis shows less wage dispersion in Spain than in other comparable economies, even after the crisis years, while the surge in unemployment during the period resulted in a high level of inequality in per capita income. The level of inequality in Spain is more moderate when total gross household income is analysed, decreasing during the crisis as a result of pensions developing more favourably than other sources of income, in conjunction with young people delaying setting up home. Inequality in per capita consumption rose during the crisis, particularly as a result of a decrease in expenditure on consumer durables by low-income households. Wealth inequality exceeds income inequality and increased during the downturn as a result of financial assets outperforming real assets. Nevertheless, Spain’s wealth inequality is moderate by international standards, as ownership of real assets is more widespread than in other countries. The way inequality has evolved during the ear","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125361345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}