The Association between Wealth Inequality and Socioeconomic Outcomes

By Omer Ali, William A. Darity Jr., Avra Janz, and Marta Sánchez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We investigate whether inequality in wealth distribution is broadly associated with adverse socioeconomic outcomes across countries. There are few studies that investigate these relationships, likely due to data limitations. On the other hand, a substanti...

The Distributional Impacts of Active Labor Market Programs for Indigenous Populations

By Donna Feir, Kelly Foley, and Maggie E. C. Jones

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We evaluate the distributional impacts of active labor market programming for indigenous peoples in Canada. Using administrative data and an empirical strategy that compares participants in high-intensity programs—skills interventions, job-creation part...

Gaming Opportunities: American Indian Casinos, Cash Transfers, and Income Mobility on the Reservation

By Emilia Simeonova, Randall Akee, and Maggie R. Jones

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the impact of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act on the income rank of American Indian (AI) reservation residents. We assemble a panel dataset at the individual level for tax filers residing on AI reservations in 1989. We examine the effect of ca...

Trends in US Spatial Inequality: Concentrating Affluence and a Democratization of Poverty

By Cecile Gaubert, Patrick Kline, Damián Vergara, and Danny Yagan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use Bureau of Economic Analysis, census, and Current Population Survey data to study trends in income inequality across US states and counties from 1960–2019. Both states and counties have diverged in terms of per capita pretax incomes since the late...

The Economic Future of Europe

[Symposium: The Transformation of Europe]

By Olivier Blanchard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2004

After three years of near stagnation, the mood in Europe is definitely gloomy. Many doubt that the European model has a future. In this paper, I argue that things are not so bad, and there is room for optimism. Over the last thirty years, productivity gro...

Closing the Gap: The Effect of Reducing Complexity and Uncertainty in College Pricing on the Choices of Low-Income Students

By Susan Dynarski, CJ Libassi, Katherine Michelmore, and Stephanie Owen

American Economic Review, June 2021

High-achieving, low-income students attend selective colleges at far lower rates than upper-income students with similar achievement. Behavioral biases, intensified by complexity and uncertainty in the admissions and aid process, may explain this gap. In ...

Enforcing Wealth Taxes in the Developing World: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Colombia

By Juliana Londoño-Vélez and Javier Ávila-Mahecha

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2021

This paper investigates the feasibility of wealth taxation in developing countries. It uses rich administrative data from Colombia and leverages a government-designed program for voluntary disclosures of hidden wealth as well as the threat of detection tr...

Higher Taxes at the Top: The Role of Entrepreneurs

By Bettina Brüggemann

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2021

This paper computes optimal top marginal tax rates in Bewley-Huggett-Aiyagari–type economies that include entrepreneurs. Consistent with the data, entrepreneurs are overrepresented at the top of the income distribution and are thus disproportionately af...

Using Labor Supply Elasticities to Learn about Income Inequality: The Role of Productivities versus Preferences

By Katy Bergstrom and William Dodds

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

Using a general labor supply model in which individuals choose how much to work conditional on productivities and preferences for consumption relative to leisure, we show that the mapping from earnings and hours worked to productivities and preferences ca...

Review of Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences

By Gerard Roland

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2021

Archeologists are actively working to quantitatively measure income and wealth inequality in ancient history based on available data, some of them being quite sophisticated. Timothy A. Kohler and Michael E. Smith's Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: Th...

Consumption Inequality and the Frequency of Purchases

By Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Dmitri Koustas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

We document a decline in the frequency of shopping trips in the United States since 1980 and consider its implications for the measurement of consumption inequality. A decline in shopping frequency as households stock up on storable goods (i.e., inventory...

The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners after the Civil War

By Philipp Ager, Leah Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson

American Economic Review, November 2021

The nullification of slave wealth after the US Civil War (1861–1865) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compression in history. We document that White Southern households that owned more slaves in 1860 lost substantially more wealth by 1870, rela...

Inequality, Bipolarization, and Tax Progressivity

By Oriol Carbonell-Nicolau and Humberto Llavador

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2021

The steady rise in income and wealth inequality in the last four decades, together with the evolution of a vanishing middle class, has raised concerns about potentially pernicious effects of these trends on social stability and economic growth. This paper...

Why Are Relatively Poor People Not More Supportive of Redistribution? Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment across Ten Countries

By Christopher Hoy and Franziska Mager

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

We test a key assumption underlying seminal theories about preferences for redistribution, which is that relatively poor people should be the most in favor of redistribution. We conduct a randomized survey experiment with over 30,000 participants across 1...

Rising Geographic Disparities in US Mortality

[Symposium: Geographic Disparities in Health]

By Benjamin K. Couillard, Christopher L. Foote, Kavish Gandhi, Ellen Meara, and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The twenty-first century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this paper, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent between 1992 and 2016. This was not simply beca...

Affirmative Action and Its Mythology

By Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Glenn C. Loury

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

For more than three decades, critics and supporters of affirmative action have fought for the moral high ground through ballot initiatives and lawsuits, in state legislatures, and in varied courts of public opinion. The goal of this paper is to show the c...

A Survey on Income Inequality in China

By Junsen Zhang

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2021

After China's recent great success in eliminating absolute poverty, addressing relative income inequality becomes a more important issue. This survey finds that income inequality rapidly increased in the first three decades since 1978 but stabilized and s...

College Tuition and Income Inequality

By Zhifeng Cai and Jonathan Heathcote

American Economic Review, January 2022

This paper evaluates the role of rising income inequality in explaining observed growth in college tuition. We develop a competitive model of the college market, in which college quality depends on instructional expenditure and the average ability of admi...

Employment Structure and the Rise of the Modern Tax System

By Anders Jensen

American Economic Review, January 2022

This paper builds a new microdatabase that covers 100 countries at all income levels and long-run time series in the United States (1870–2010) and Mexico (1960–2010) to document how the modern tax system arises over development. I establish a new set ...

The Rise of the Machines: Automation, Horizontal Innovation, and Income Inequality

By David Hémous and Morten Olsen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2022

We build an endogenous growth model with automation (the replacement of low-skill workers with machines) and horizontal innovation (the creation of new products). Over time, the share of automation innovations endogenously increases through an increase in...