Young Adults and Labor Markets in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Oriana Bandiera, Ahmed Elsayed, Andrea Smurra, and Céline Zipfel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Every year, millions of young adults join the labor market in Africa. This paper harmonizes surveys and censuses from 68 low- and middle-income countries to compare their job prospects to those of their counterparts in other low-income regions. We show th...

Epidemics, Inequality, and Poverty in Preindustrial and Early Industrial Times

By Guido Alfani

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

Recent research has explored the distributive consequences of major historical epidemics, and the current crisis triggered by COVID-19 prompts us to look at the past for insights about how pandemics can affect inequalities in income, wealth, and health....

High Marginal Tax Rates on the Top 1 Percent? Lessons from a Life-Cycle Model with Idiosyncratic Income Risk

By Fabian Kindermann and Dirk Krueger

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2022

This paper argues that high marginal labor income tax rates on top earners are an effective tool for social insurance even when households have high labor supply elasticity, households make dynamic savings decisions, and policies have general equilibrium ...

The Electric Gini: Income Redistribution through Energy Prices

By Arik Levinson and Emilson Silva

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

In theory, regulators concerned about inequality will deviate from efficient two-part tariffs, charging lower-than-efficient fixed monthly fees and higher-than-efficient per-kilowatt-hour prices. To quantify that relationship, we develop a measure of the ...

The Cumulative Costs of Racism and the Bill for Black Reparations

[Symposium: Economics of Slavery]

By William Darity Jr., A. Kirsten Mullen, and Marvin Slaughter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2022

Two major procedures for establishing the monetary value of a plan for reparations for Black American descendants of US slavery are considered in this paper: 1) Enumeration of atrocities and assignment of a dollar value to each as a prelude to adding up...

At the Intersection of Race, Occupational Status, and Middle-Class Attainment in Young Adulthood

By Fenaba R. Addo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 cohort, the study explores the intersection of labor force attachment and economic inequality. Using a wealth-based definition of middle-class status, changes in wealth inequality among the wor...

Wealth Taxation: Lessons from History and Recent Developments

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper describes the historical experience of wealth taxation in Europe and draws lessons from this history for wealth taxation in the twenty-first century. We show that the wealth tax base was narrow in European countries, due to large exemptions, ta...

Saving Effects of a Real-Life Imperfectly Implemented Wealth Tax: Evidence from Norwegian Micro Data

By Annette Alstadsæter, Marie Bjørneby, Wojciech Kopczuk, Simen Markussen, and Knut Røed

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Countries that implement wealth taxes make many practical compromises regarding relative treatment and approach to valuation of different categories of assets in order to ease assessment and liquidity difficulties with this form of taxation. Relying on No...

Gender and Inheritances

By Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux, Fanny Landaud, and Kjell G. Salvanes

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using administrative data from Norway, we document that gifts and inheritances are a more important component of total income for women than for men. This is particularly true at the very top of the distributions of total lifetime income and net wealth. T...

The Correlation of Net and Gross Wealth across Generations: The Role of Parent Income and Child Age

By N. Meltem Daysal, Michael F. Lovenheim, and David N. Wasser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We use Danish register data to examine intergenerational rank-rank correlations in net wealth and gross housing wealth by child age and parental income. Our results indicate that gross housing wealth correlations are more stable by child age than are net ...

Is the Partisan Divide Real? Polarization in Preferences for Redistribution

By Brad Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Alejandro Zentner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

There is a widespread belief that Republicans and Democrats are worlds apart with respect to their preferences for redistribution. However, is that partisan divide real? In this paper, we discuss evidence from the General Social Survey and a tailored surv...

Boomtowns: Local Shocks and Inequality in 1920s California

By Sarah Quincy and Rowena Gray

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

As the United States economy grew in the 1920s, both wealth and income inequality rose as well. California land values were especially volatile as a variety of shocks buffeted the state. This paper summarizes how these local booms affected housing inequal...

Income Declines during COVID-19

By Jeff Larrimore, Jacob Mortenson, and David Splinter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The COVID-19 recession caused regressive market income changes in the United States, with large losses more frequent than during the Great Recession and more concentrated at the bottom of the distribution. Progressive taxes and transfers, especially from ...

The Racial Wealth Gap and the Role of Firm Ownership

By Avi Lipton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper develops an overlapping generations model that isolates the impact of the US racial wealth gap in 1962 on the long-run dynamics of wealth. The model predicts that one component of the initial gap, firm ownership, coupled with the intergeneratio...

Position and Possessions: Stratification Economics and Intergroup Inequality

By William A. Darity Jr.

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

This article provides an overview of the origins and development of stratification economics as a subfield that centers the importance of identity, social ranking, and relative group position. Stratification economics developed in response to explanations...

The Long-Run Evolution of Absolute Intergenerational Mobility

By Yonatan Berman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

This paper combines cross-sectional and longitudinal income data to present the evolution of absolute intergenerational income mobility in ten advanced economies in the twentieth century. Absolute mobility decreased during the second half of the twentieth...

African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility since 1880

By William J. Collins and Marianne H. Wanamaker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We document the intergenerational mobility of Black and White American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new historical datasets for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and combining them with modern data to cover the middle and late twen...

And Yet It Moves: Intergenerational Mobility in Italy

By Paolo Acciari, Alberto Polo, and Giovanni L. Violante

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We estimate intergenerational income mobility in Italy using administrative data from tax returns. Our estimates of mobility are higher than prior work using survey data and indirect methods. The rank-rank slope of parent-child income is 0.22, compared to...

Health, Inequality, and Economic Development

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2003

I discuss mechanisms linking health and inequality and review evidence for effects of income inequality on aggregate and individual mortality, over time and over space. I conclude that there is no direct link. Correlations come from factors other than inc...

Gini and Optimal Income Taxation by Rank

By Laurent Simula and Alain Trannoy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

We solve the nonlinear income tax program for rank-dependent social welfare functions, expressing the trade-off between size and inequality using the Gini and related families of positional indices. Absent bunching, ranks in the actual and optimal allocat...