The effects on inequality and mobility of exposure to Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe
比较东欧受苏联共产主义影响与未受影响国家的不平等和社会流动性趋势，发现受苏联影响的国家社会流动性更高，但不平等差异不大，可能因福利国家与官僚分配效率的抵消作用。
We compare inequality and social mobility trends in Eastern European countries exposed to Soviet Communist (SC) regimes with those not exposed, using similar welfare measures. We draw upon a rich retrospective dataset that collects relevant welfare measures across regimes including information on living space and self-reported health, and relevant inequality and mobility indices for ordinal and categorical data. Our results suggest evidence of comparable welfare inequality trends in countries exposed to SC and those unexposed. Although individuals exposed to SC enjoyed higher levels of social mobility, differences in inequality across countries exposed to different regimes were negligible. A plausible explanation lies in the countervailing role of the welfare state in countries not exposed to SC and the inefficiency of the bureaucratic allocation of private goods aimed at reducing inequality in countries exposed to SC.