The Inheritance of Inequality

[Symposium: Intergenerational Mobility]

By Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

How level is the intergenerational playing field? What are the causal mechanisms that underlie the intergenerational transmission of economic status? Are these mechanisms amenable to public policies in a way that would make the attainment of economic succ...

Intergenerational Inequality: A Sociological Perspective

[Symposium: Intergenerational Mobility]

By Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

When economists are concerned with the inheritance of inequality, they typically focus on the intergenerational transmission of income or wealth. In contrast, sociologists are more likely to analyze intergenerational mobility between (and immobility in) d...

Economic Interpretations of Intergenerational Correlations

[Symposium: Intergenerational Mobility]

By Nathan D. Grawe and Casey B. Mulligan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

Since accurate prediction ultimately determines the usefulness of theory, our paper gives the reader a taste of some predictions derived from economic theory and some empirical successes and failures. We provide only a taste, because there are a great man...

Cross-Country Differences in Intergenerational Earnings Mobility

[Symposium: Intergenerational Mobility]

By Gary Solon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002

International studies of the extent to which economic status is passed from one generation to the next are important for at least two reasons. First, each study of a particular country characterizes an important feature of that country's income inequality...

Unpacking Skill Bias: Automation and New Tasks

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We extend the canonical model of skill-biased technical change by modeling the allocation of tasks to factors and allowing for automation and the creation of new tasks. In our model, factor prices depend on the set of tasks they perform. Automation can re...

Wealth Stratification and Portfolio Choice

By Karl David Boulware and Kenneth N. Kuttner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper investigates the past decade's increase in wealth inequality along racial and ethnic lines. Using a new measure of wealth stratification based on data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that stratification increased significantly for...

The Limits of the Commune: A Review of The Mystery of the Kibbutz

By John V. C. Nye

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2020

Ran Abramitzky's book, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World, tries to answer the questions of why the communal kibbutz worked so well in Israel's formative years and what limits its current success in modern Is...

The Fall of Enron

[Symposium: Enron and Conflict of Interest]

By Paul M. Healy and Krishna G. Palepu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

The financial reporting and disclosure problems at Enron, as well as the high market valuations for its stock raise troubling questions about the functioning of capital market intermediaries, regulators and governance experts whose are supposed to ensure ...

Corporate Conflicts of Interest

[Symposium: Enron and Conflict of Interest]

By Joel S. Demski

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

This paper surveys conflicts of interest in the corporate governance arena, with emphasis on auditors, boards of directors, analysts and investment bankers, regulators, management, attorneys and investors. Enron provides a host of examples as well. I stre...

Health Care Costs: On the Rise Again

By Sherry Glied

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2003

Since 1999, health care costs have been growing faster than national income. This rapid growth has occurred as the ability of private and public purchasers to reduce service utilization and bargain for lower prices has fallen, insurers have recouped lost ...

Rich Pickings? Risk, Return, and Skill in Household Wealth

By Laurent Bach, Laurent E. Calvet, and Paolo Sodini

American Economic Review, September 2020

We investigate wealth returns on an administrative panel containing the disaggregated balance sheets of Swedish residents. The expected return on household net wealth is strongly persistent, determined primarily by systematic risk, and increasing in net w...

The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality in America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

This paper studies inequality in America through the lens of distributional macroeconomic accounts—comprehensive distributions of the aggregate amount of income and wealth recorded in the official macroeconomic accounts of the United States. We use th...

Growing Income Inequality in the United States and Other Advanced Economies

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Florian Hoffmann, David S. Lee, and Thomas Lemieux

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

This paper studies the contribution of both labor and non-labor income in the growth in income inequality in the United States and large European economies. The paper first shows that the capital to labor income ratio disproportionately increased among ...

Poverty and Migration in the Digital Age: Experimental Evidence on Mobile Banking in Bangladesh

By Jean N. Lee, Jonathan Morduch, Saravana Ravindran, Abu Shonchoy, and Hassan Zaman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021

Rapid urbanization is reshaping economies and intensifying spatial inequalities. In Bangladesh, we experimentally introduced mobile banking to very poor rural households and family members who had migrated to the city, testing whether mobile technology ca...

Optimal Positive Capital Taxes at Interior Steady States

By Jess Benhabib and Bálint Szőke

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2021

We generalize recent results of Bassetto and Benhabib (2006 ) and Straub and Werning (2019 ) in a neoclassical model with endogenous labor-leisure choice where all agents are allowed to save and accumulate capital. We provide a sufficient condition under ...

City Limits: What Do Local-Area Minimum Wages Do?

[Symposium: Minimum Wage]

By Arindrajit Dube and Attila Lindner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2021

Cities are increasingly setting their own minimum wages, and this trend has accelerated sharply in recent years. While in 2010 there were only three cities with their own minimum wages exceeding the state or federal standard, by 2020 there were 42. This n...

Taxing Our Wealth

By Florian Scheuer and Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2021

This paper evaluates proposals for an annual wealth tax. While a dozen OECD countries levied wealth taxes in the recent past, now only three retain them, with only Switzerland raising a comparable fraction of revenue as recent proposals for a US wealth ta...

Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Times: Europe and Beyond

By Guido Alfani

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Recent literature has reconstructed estimates of wealth and income inequality for a range of preindustrial, mostly European, societies covering medieval and early modern times, occasionally reaching back to antiquity and even prehistory. These estimates...

Heterogeneous Workers and Federal Income Taxes in a Spatial Equilibrium

By Mark Colas and Kevin Hutchinson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2021

We study the geographic incidence and efficiency of an income tax by estimating a spatial equilibrium model with heterogeneous workers. The US income tax shifts households out of high-productivity cities, leading to locational inefficiency of 0.25 percent...

Intergenerational Economic Mobility and the Racial Wealth Gap

By Jermaine Toney and Cassandra L. Robertson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

A growing body of research documents the importance of wealth and the racial wealth gap in perpetuating inequality across generations. We examine the impact of wealth on child income. Our two-stage least squares regressions reveal that grandparental wealt...