Download or read book Essays on Inequality and Stagnation written by Troy Alexander Ludtka and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This research develops a framework that identifies the costs and causes of rising trends of inequality. Inequality is shaped by exogenous overarching trends, which incentivize market structure dynamism. Shifts in exogenous trends lead to microeconomic reaction that manifest with increased inequality. It isshown that inequality is functionally recursive meaning a domino effect will occur when unprecedented incipient policy induces breaks in macro trends. Partially corrective feedbacks manifest in the form of increased exports, which originate from the exercise of economies of scale occurring in a dynamic industrial organization. This feedback, however, is unilaterally sufficient to restore growth equilibrium. Growth levels short of the restoration or increase in ex ante group distribution—contribute to debt overhang and thereby investment shortfall. The cascading consequences of increased inequality are shown to force macro stagnation. This research structures the analysis around a C+I+G framework to explain stagnation and its amelioration.

Download or read book Inequality and Stagnation written by Santiago Capraro and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-02 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines how the outgrowth of the financial industry has contributed to the recent tendencies towards inequality and stagnation. It proposes a monetary interpretation of these events using a Classical–Keynesian theoretical approach derived from the work of Keynes and Sraffa. The approach moves from the distributive conflicts among economic and social groups, presuming that they influence the legislation shaping the organisation of the markets and the policy of the authorities. It argues that the degrees of liquidity of assets, which reflect the individual perceptions of their future prices, ultimately depend on the organisation of the markets and policy decisions. The development of his work persuaded Keynes that it was necessary to revolutionise the scientific foundations of economic discipline to effectively interpret events and recommend policies. He consequently introduced in 1932 a monetary theory of production. Following these lines, Sraffa proposed in Production of Commodities to take the rate of interest as an independent variable in the theory of distribution. Using the Classical–Keynesian approach, the book shows how the changes in legislation and policies since the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreements have caused the outgrowth of finance and how these alterations have raised financial instability. It identifies various competitive mechanisms through which financial events can affect income distribution and growth, describing how they have triggered the recent tendencies towards inequality and stagnation. This book is essential reading for researchers studying the interactions among financial markets, distribution, and growth.

Download or read book The Great Stagnation written by Tyler Cowen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Download or read book Essays on Inequality and Development written by Shibalee Majumdar and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Inequality in the social, political and economic realms of an individual and a society's existence affects the social fabric and individual well-being. Even when the average income and food production of the world has increased manifolds in the last fifty years, extreme poverty and malnutrition exists in many parts of the world. The aim of my dissertation is to address a few relevant questions that are bound to arise in any mind that has been exposed to the developments of the local and global world. While my first essay questions the efficacy of the political reservation system in India in abating social and political inequality and improving the life of minority groups, my second and third essays studies the interactions between economic growth, government policies and income inequality. Reviewing previous research and detailed empirical analysis shows that the affirmative action of political reservation still has to go a long way in bringing the standard of living of the minority groups at par with the mainstream population, that economic growth has a heterogeneous association with income inequality across regions and that people-based and place-based government policies have non-uniform impact on inequality.

Download or read book Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality written by Ms.Era Dabla-Norris and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.

Download or read book Accounting for Disparity written by Melanie Seama O'Gorman and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three essays which focus on accounting for the sources of economic inequality in various contexts. The first two essays focus on disparity of agricultural labour productivity across the developing countries, while the third analyzes racial earnings inequality. The main goal of these essays is to shed light on some of the mechanisms which have generated these types of inequality, in order to better design policies for ameliorating them. The first essay is empirical, while the second and third essays construct general equilibrium models so as to quantitatively assess the importance of proposed sources of inequality. The first essay finds that a large proportion of the variation of the level and growth of agricultural labour productivity across a sample of developing countries can be explained by variation in input use across countries. I demonstrate that our understanding of disparity of labour productivity in developing country agriculture can be significantly improved by accounting for variation in the adoption of high-yielding seed varieties and for correlation between input use and technological change across countries. The second essay analyzes the factors which have contributed to agricultural stagnation in Sub-Saharan Africa, despite productivity improvements in agriculture in other developing regions. I construct a quantitative model which can match average Sub-Saharan African trends of agricultural labour productivity, crop yields and input use from 1965 to 2000. The model points to key factors which have constrained agricultural productivity growth over this period, and to the need for diverse yet concerted policies to arrest this stagnation. The third essay presents a quantitative model which sheds light on racial earnings inequality in the U.S., South Africa and Brazil. This model indicates that a large proportion of the racial wage gap in these three countries can be attributed to differential human capital accumulation by race. Most notably, distortions created by the explicit, racially-biased education system which existed in South Africa during Apartheid can explain roughly three quarters of the racial wage gap in South Africa in the early 1990's.

Download or read book The Idea of Natural Inequality and Other Essays written by André Béteille and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume deal with various aspects of inequality with special reference to contemporary India, viewed in a comparative perspective.

Download or read book Reflections on Progress written by Kemal Derviş and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " Now, more than ever, the world needs growth-oriented and socially inclusive policymaking. Is the world giving up on the promise of ever-greater prosperity for all, on functioning democratic institutions, and on long-term peace? Is the special set of circumstances that led to the recent rapid growth in emerging markets unlikely to be present in the future? Will the second decade of the twenty first century end with "secular stagnation"? Does the rise of authoritarianism, populism, and fanatic nihilism--all experienced over the last few years--threaten to unravel what has been built painstakingly since the catastrophe of World War II? Kemal Dervis addresses these and similar questions in this thought-provoking series of essays written for Project Syndicate from 2011 to 2015. The essays are organized in three sections: global economic interdependence, inequality and the political economy of reform, and the specific challenge of Europe. The common theme is the need for growth-oriented and socially inclusive policymaking in an interdependent world. These kinds of policies offer the potential for another wave of unprecedented human progress aided by breathtaking new technologies. However, a huge and destabilizing disruption is possible if policymaking is not globally cooperative and is not focused on inclusion and greater equity. These essays synthesize the experience and analysis of a scholar and policymaker with national, regional, and international experience at the highest levels. Dervis exhibits a passion for combining strongly held values with political feasibility."

Download or read book Essays on Inequality and Poverty written by Marta Ruiz-Arranz and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Reflections on Progress written by Brookings Institution Press and published by . This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Inequality written by Jack Richard Blundell and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widespread prevalence of rising economic inequality across western democracies has led to immense academic and policy interest, as well as the rapid development of the tools required to study it. Researchers are now equipped with rich data and advanced computational methods which are well-suited to analyzing the processes underlying the extensive differences exhibited across individuals and groups within and between societies. To an extent, diverse outcomes reflect an intrinsic natural variation in individual tastes and preferences. However, in many cases we rather consider inequalities, particularly economic inequalities, to reflect injustice, misallocation and constrained opportunities. When considering labor market earnings, a substantial proportion of the variation across individuals can be explained by a single predictor: a worker's gender. In the first chapter of this dissertation I study a policy explicitly designed to reduce this association, in which employers are required to publicly report gender pay gap statistics. Proponents argue that increasing the information available to workers and consumers places pressure on firms to close pay gaps, but opponents argue that such policies are poorly targeted and ineffective. I contribute to the debate by analyzing the UK's recent reporting policy, in which employers are mandated to publicly report simple measures of their gender pay gap each year. Exploiting a discontinuous size threshold in the policy's coverage, I apply a difference-in-difference strategy to linked employer-employee payroll data. I find that the introduction of reporting requirements led to a 1.6 percentage-point narrowing of the gender pay gap at affected employers. This large-magnitude effect is primarily due to a decline in male wages within affected employers and is not caused by a change in the composition of the workforce. To explain this effect, I propose that a worker preference against high pay gap employers induces the closing of pay gaps upon information revelation. Newly-gathered survey evidence shows that female workers in particular exhibit a significant preference for low pay gap employers. In a hypothetical choice experiment, over half of women accept a 2.5\% lower salary to avoid a high pay gap employer. I also demonstrate substantial heterogeneity in the interpretation of pay gap statistics across workers and show that this affects their valuation of jobs at employers with different pay gaps. Does the importance of your family background on how far you get in adulthood also depend on where you grow up? For England and Wales, a paucity of data has made this a difficult question to reliably answer. My second chapter, co-authored with Brian Bell and Stephen Machin, presents a new analysis of intergenerational mobility across three cohorts in England and Wales using linked decennial census microdata. These data permit the study of different mobility outcomes in occupation, home ownership and education, at the spatial level through time. As well as showing national results consistent with previous studies, we find strong sub-regional patterns in mobility, with four main results emerging. First, area-level differences in upward occupational mobility are highly persistent over time. Second, consistent with evidence from other countries, absolute and relative mobility are positively correlated for all measures and particularly strongly for home ownership. Third, there is a robust relationship between upward educational and upward occupational mobility. Last, there is a small negative relationship between upward home ownership mobility and upward occupational mobility, revealing that social mobility comparisons based on different outcomes can have different trends. Social scientists have long been interested in the relationship between parental factors and later child income. Finding the best characterization of this relationship for the question at hand is however fraught with choices. In my third chapter, co-authored with Erling Risa, we use machine learning methods to assess the `completeness' of one popular modelling approach. Here, completeness refers to how well the model summarizes the total predictive relationship between multiple parental factors and a single child outcome. Machine learning methods enable us to depart from functional form assumptions, allowing flexible interactions between a large set of possible parental factors. Using our most flexible complete model as a benchmark, we assess the popular `rank-rank' model relating parent and child incomes. Applying our approach to high-quality Norwegian administrative data, we demonstrate that the rank-rank model explains 68\% of the total explainable variation in child income rank, based on a broad set of potential parental factors entering a neural network. Parental wealth and parental education explain the majority of the remaining explainable variation. At the regional level, we estimate homogeneous completeness across areas. Rankings of areas based on rank-rank slope estimates align with those based on the predictive fit of the broader flexible model.

Download or read book How Will Capitalism End written by Wolfgang Streeck and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provocative political thinker asks if it will be with a bang or a whimper In How Will Capitalism End? the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth is giving way to secular stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the capitalist money economy has all but evaporated. Capitalism’s shotgun marriage with democracy since 1945 is breaking up as the regulatory institutions restraining its advance have collapsed, and after the final victory of capitalism over its enemies no political agency capable of rebuilding them is in sight. The capitalist system is stricken with at least five worsening disorders for which no cure is at hand: declining growth, oligarchy, starvation of the public sphere, corruption and international anarchy. In this arresting book Wolfgang Streeck asks whether we are witnessing a long and painful period of cumulative decay: of intensifying frictions, of fragility and uncertainty, and of a steady succession of “normal accidents.”

Download or read book Essays on Inequality and Growth written by Ozan Hatipogl̆u and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book After Piketty written by Heather Boushey and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year “An intellectual excursion of a kind rarely offered by modern economics.” —Foreign Affairs Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent years. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from there in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of leading economists and other social scientists—including Emmanuel Saez, Branko Milanovic, Laura Tyson, and Michael Spence—tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty. “A fantastic introduction to Piketty’s main argument in Capital, and to some of the main criticisms, including doubt that his key equation...showing that returns on capital grow faster than the economy—will hold true in the long run.” —Nature “Piketty’s work...laid bare just how ill-equipped our existing frameworks are for understanding, predicting, and changing inequality. This extraordinary collection shows that our most nimble social scientists are responding to the challenge.” —Justin Wolfers, University of Michigan

Download or read book Redistribution Inequality and Growth written by Mr.Jonathan David Ostry and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fund has recognized in recent years that one cannot separate issues of economic growth and stability on one hand and equality on the other. Indeed, there is a strong case for considering inequality and an inability to sustain economic growth as two sides of the same coin. Central to the Fund’s mandate is providing advice that will enable members’ economies to grow on a sustained basis. But the Fund has rightly been cautious about recommending the use of redistributive policies given that such policies may themselves undercut economic efficiency and the prospects for sustained growth (the so-called “leaky bucket” hypothesis written about by the famous Yale economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s). This SDN follows up the previous SDN on inequality and growth by focusing on the role of redistribution. It finds that, from the perspective of the best available macroeconomic data, there is not a lot of evidence that redistribution has in fact undercut economic growth (except in extreme cases). One should be careful not to assume therefore—as Okun and others have—that there is a big tradeoff between redistribution and growth. The best available macroeconomic data do not support such a conclusion.

Download or read book Essays on Financial Macroeconomics and Inequality written by Ignacio Gonzalez and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of three self-contained chapters on the same topic: the impact of financial markets on inequality. The first paper investigates the connection between the increase of equity wealth, the rise stock-market returns, the slowdown of corporate investment and the decline of the labor share in the U.S. economy. I use a version of the standard heterogeneous-agent model to explain the connection of these phenomena and I identify three driving forces. In particular, I show that the fall of the average marginal tax on capital income, the reduction of stock-market costs and a higher inclination towards corporate short-termism explain the decrease of investment and the rise of equity prices. This way, the model predicts an endogenous upsurge of equity Tobin's Q and, importantly, the rise of equity returns. The decline of the labor share occurs in response to investment sluggishness when capital and labor are complements, which requires an elasticity of substitution consistent with the values found in the literature. Given the predictions of the model, the paper solves what Joseph Stiglitz has recently called the Piketty puzzle: why has the wealth-output ratio and capital returns increased, while wages have not. The second paper, which is joint work with Pedro Trivin, extends the previous analysis to a panel of countries. We use a reduced-form framework with wealth in the utility function to obtain an estimable equation and, by using recent panel time-series techniques, we find that the increase in Tobin's Q explain almost 60 per cent of the total decline in the labor share. The third paper makes a theoretical contribution to recent debate on secular stagnation. I use a growth model with imperfect competition to show that the rise of monopoly rents is consistent with several investment and inequality dynamics that have characterized the post-1980 stagnant era.

Download or read book Agent Based Models in Economics written by Domenico Delli Gatti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first step-by-step introduction to the methodology of agent-based models in economics, their mathematical and statistical analysis, and real-world applications.