IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crm/wpaper/2552.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Roots of Inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Oded Galor
  • Marc Klemp
  • Daniel C. Wainstock

Abstract

Why does inequality vary across societies? Why are some societies more unequal than others? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where income differentials reflect variations in productive traits, a significant share of cross-societal differences in inequality may reflect enduring variation in the degree of diversity within societies, rooted in the prehistoric Out-of-Africa migration. Patterns of inequality within the U.S. population are consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that disparities among groups originating from different ancestral societies may be related to the degree of diversity within those societies, shaped during humanity's dispersal from Africa. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, populations whose ancestors originated closer to East Africa tend to exhibit greater dispersion in productive traits-education, ability, and labor supply-channels that appear to mediate the relationship between diversity and inequality.

Suggested Citation

  • Oded Galor & Marc Klemp & Daniel C. Wainstock, 2025. "Roots of Inequality," RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series 2552, Rockwool Foundation Berlin (RF Berlin).
    • Handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:2552
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/25052.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General
    • O10 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - General
    • Z10 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:2552. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Moritz Lubczyk or Matthew Nibloe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cmucluk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.