Questions tagged [inequality]
Differences in resource allocations or opportunities that arise within or between countries.
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Can you prove, and with what assumptions, that a market will allocate some minimum amount of basic resources to every worker?
I'm looking for a summary/less technical answer, as I'm not very well versed in the details of economic theory. I'm curious if there is some way to show that under some circumstances in a market ...
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2answers
56 views
Does quantitative easing favour banks?
The reserve bank recently announced it would print $100B over 6 months, and spend this buying back gov bonds.
Will this policy advantage the financial sector over other parts of the economy?
Why ...
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0answers
20 views
Lorenz curve extension to 3d?
While thinking about Lorenz curves and economic inequality I wondered if you can extend Lorenz curves to Lorenz surfaces by revolving a Lorenz curve about the line of perfect equality.
Would such a ...
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1answer
32 views
Can demand side restrictions explain the productivity paradox (Solow paradox)?
Productivity paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox is the name for the slow productivity growth (i.e. slow GDP growth) of the developed economies despite the robotics, AI, ...
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1answer
56 views
Does Singapore's computation of the Gini coefficient exclude low-paid foreign workers?
The Economist (2015-07-16):
But Singapore measures its coefficient rather differently, excluding shorter-term foreign workers and non-working families.
More generally, how is Singapore's Gini ...
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1answer
32 views
Capital/Income Ratio in Pikketty's Capital
In Capital by Thomas Pikketty, https://www.robertdkirkby.com/blog/2015/summary-of-piketty-i/, he states that World War I and World War II were the main reasons why the Capital Income to Labour Income ...
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2answers
88 views
Do rich people on average have the vast majority of their wealth invested or they have lots of liquid cash/no productive properties?
I often read about really rich people with billions of dollars, and I'd like to know if they have, for example, just a big part of their wealth in shares of their company or they have lots of wealth ...
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1answer
40 views
How much heath expenditure is due to conditions that people are born with?
The CDC says that 90% of US healthcare costs are attributable to chronic conditions. I am interested in an overlapping set of conditions: those that people are born with, including genetic diseases, ...
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15 views
Inequality and recessions
I was reading about Marx's Crisis Theory. On one hand, there is this idea of the falling surplus. But on the other hand, he relates income inequality to the business cycle.
Have his ideas regarding ...
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1answer
227 views
What does Piketty mean by the C90/C10 ratio?
I am currently readings Piketty's "The Economics of Inequality", where he states in chapter 3:
The P90/P10 wage ratio in the United States in the 1990s is 4.5, whereas it is “only” 3.2 in France (...
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Why is imputed rental income for owner-occupied housing included in the measurement of household income?
In the National Income Dynamics Study in South Africa, total household income is measured by totalling labour income, government income, investment income, capital income, agricultural income, ...
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1answer
93 views
Are Open Market Operations a Gift to the .1%?
My Background
I was an Economics major a long time ago and I don't work in a related field. I have this question that's been nagging me. I hope somebody can answer the questions at the bottom.
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2answers
41 views
What do all the distributions that have the same Gini index have in common?
According to the Wikipedia article about Income inequality metrics, Gini index have the next disadvantage:
As a disadvantage, the Gini index only maps a number to the properties of a diagram, but the ...
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1answer
19 views
What does the vertical axis of the Kuznets curve depict (mathematically)?
I do not understand what does the word "inequality" means on the vertical axis of the Kuznets curve. Can someone please explain?
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29 views
What policies can a government adopt to promote economic equality?
As per the Oxfam survey, Top 1% owns more than the bottom 50% of the population. There is also an enormous wage gap emerging, such as that our average CEO makes something like 200x much more than ...
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1answer
43 views
Where is the split in the wealth gap? [closed]
I've been curious where the split in the wealth gap has been over time, and if it was possible to graph it.
Put another way, at what net worth is the number of those worth more shrinking in ...
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1answer
21 views
Have Raj Chetty's Opportunity Atlas stats changed or been recalculated since early 2019?
During a talk at Google, Raj Chetty said "Fruitvale, in Oakland ... here you see that for black men growing up in low income families in Fruitvale, the average income in adulthood is 5,600 dollars" (...
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1answer
46 views
Income/Wealth Inequality; Why does it matter?
I have attempted to answer this question on my own through reading books, blog, and other economic pieces of literature but they all fail to articulate why wealth or income disparities matter. Now ...
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52 views
Combine Gini index with GNI/capita (PPP) to produce an indicator which gives the same weight to low percentile incomes as to high percentile incomes
Consider the attached charts, which illustrate that low-inequality Country A can have both a lower average income and higher average log income than high-inequality Country B. This sparked my interest ...
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1answer
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Is Buy Nothing Day a classist protest of Black Friday?
I hope this isn't off topic, it seems specifically economic to me even though it probably intersects with other fields of study.
Black Friday is seen as an iconic hallmark of consumerism, and Buy ...
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1answer
29 views
Are there any effective research efforts into combating wealth inequality?
There seems to be no "correct" answer in combating wealth inequality; however, we should attempt to use different methods to combat inequality in cities, then counties, then states, then countries.
...
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1answer
76 views
Kuhn Tucker Maximization
I have to maximize following expected utility function using Kuhn tucker conditions -
Since expected utility function are increasing $C_{1,t}$ and $C_{2,t}$ so constraints (i) and (ii) will hold with ...
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Data for income distributions
Knowing the average income per capita or the median income is a rather poor economical indicator of a country, even when given in PPP\$. Knowing the (dimension-less) Gini index is somehow better, but ...
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28 views
What impact does deficit spending have on economic inequality?
Taxation schemes can be classified as progressive (the tax rate is higher for higher income brackets), regressive (the tax rate is lower for higher income brackets), or neutral (the tax rate is the ...
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27 views
How does monetary policy affect inequality?
My thought process here would be that since government bonds are usually held by the richer households, buying of these government bonds would inject a large amount of money only to the richest, thus ...
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1answer
50 views
Social mobility and income inequality
I once read an argument by the libertarian economist Thomas Sowell against the conventional wisdom that rising income is bad because most statistics which show rising income inequality do not account ...
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1answer
59 views
Fehr & Schmidt, ultimatum game, inequaltiy aversion, perfect subgame Nash equilibrium
I am preparing for an exam. I have found an old exam but I have no solutions for it, so I tried to solve it, but I dont know if I did it correctly and need therefore your help.
The problem looks as ...
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2answers
659 views
Why does Denmark have such a huge disparity between its income and wealth Gini coefficients?
(After-transfer) income inequality and wealth inequality are obviously not the same thing, but I would intuitively expect that, all else equal, they would be reasonably well correlated across ...
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0answers
28 views
Ideal levels of inequality
Has any work been done to try to figure out what a productive level of wealth and income inequality is in a country? i.e. the minimum to provide incentive for 'hard' work, and necessary risk taking in ...
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1answer
17 views
World Inequality Database: Top 10% Income Share U.S. vs. Top 10% Average Income
I want to use the U.S. data from the World Inequality Database for a VAR analysis. However, I am confused as to why the series for the top 10% income share only runs back to 1962, while the series for ...
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2answers
78 views
What if price were a function of buyer's income?
If everyone's income were public information, would purely profit-seeking sellers benefit from charging different prices to people based on their different incomes? My intuition says yes because a ...
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0answers
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Does PPP measure conversion taken into account government service and taxes?
Apology in advance if this question seems too elementary. I am intrigued by this article I came across,Do We Care About Income Inequality, or Absolute Well-Being?
And in the article the author was ...
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1answer
110 views
Data Set of Bourguignon and Morrison 2002 AER
This question is about the following paper:
F. Bourguignon and C. Morrison "Inequality among World Citizens: 1820-1992", American Economic Review, Vol. 92, No. 4. (Sep., 2002), pp. 727-744.
On p.730,...
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58 views
labor share and growth
Is there a link between the level of the labor share and growth?
In standard models growth is the rate of (labor augmenting) technical progress and labor force. So does that mean if the labor share ...
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0answers
24 views
Is there an income inequality metric which also considers the total income?
I'm trying to compare some data I have about two companies, and in order to do so I need to compare their income inequality, but also to take in consideration the total income of each.
For example if ...
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0answers
47 views
Has any research found that automation will decrease inequality?
A paper by IMF researchers (but not an official position of the IMF) has found that automation will lead to higher inequality under all scenarios they considered.
Even in the scenario where robots ...
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0answers
39 views
Is there a theoretical basis for any popular income- or wealth-distribution model?
When modelling income or wealth, we probably want a continuous distribution with a lower bound; statisticians have named many, but Pareto and log-normal distributions have been among the most ...
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2answers
52 views
A unique global currency and a balanced macroeconomic system
During my last trip, I traveled in Bolivia for two months, and I was struck seeing how life was cheap there, from a European point of view. I believe that is the same in the great majority of the "...
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1answer
97 views
Measuring inequality at the zip code or county level in the United States?
I am trying to calculate a statistic for inequality at the zip code or county level in order to merge with another data set. I am using IRS SOI data, but the data given is returns by AGI bin (i.e., 1-...
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4answers
162 views
Is wealth inequality actually a problem
I have been searching around online, but cannot really find an answer to my question.
I can find a lot of material covering wealth inequality and how it has developed over time, but haven’t found any ...
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1answer
32 views
Dimensional analysis for the qdf/quantile function corresponding to the pdf/CDF for the size distribution of income
I have previously posted a very similar question on Stackoverflow, but based on responses there I have decided that the real nub of my question is economic. I will give a longish introduction, mainly ...
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2answers
102 views
Productivity and wages in a task-based model
In a task-based model like the one developed in Acemoglu&Autor 2011 with two types of worker, can the low type have a higher wage with respect to the high type?
More specifically: if the ...
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0answers
41 views
Has the shrinking of the American household improved or diminished household welfare?
Over the last fifty years U.S. average household size has declined dramatically. When making within-year comparisons of household income, it is regarded as good practice to adjust for adult-equivalent ...
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0answers
64 views
What would happen if there was a one-time redistribution of wealth from the wealthiest 1% to the other 99% of people in the US? [closed]
If you think this is going to lead to answers which are too speculative, let me know, but I think it should be possible to at least make some strong educated guesses...
What would happen if there was ...
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1answer
446 views
Is inequality good for growth? [closed]
I was reading about the debate about income inequality and I would like to know your opinion on the matter.
Basically, the positions are two: the classical one, which states that inequality is good ...
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1answer
57 views
How much the wealth inequality increased in the USA in the last decades?
Are there any studies trying to measure the increase of the wealth inequality in the USA?
Say for example how much it increased, comparing with 1990. Or compared with any other moment in time after ...
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3answers
175 views
Explaining the development of income inequality
I'm a syndicated writer working on an explainer about income inequality and I realized I didn't really understand how it can possibly develop in an economy where all dollars are spent. That is, let's ...
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0answers
46 views
How many of the world's workers are producing luxury vs necessary goods?
Has there been any scholarship done on the proportion of producers producing high-end vs low-end goods? This could also be framed as the proportion of economic activity generated by wealth excess of a ...
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1answer
428 views
Has US real median personal/household income been stagnant since the late 1970's/early 1980's?
This is referring to an earlier question: Why are real median household incomes stagnant?
How do the following graphs actually tell you that US real median personal/household income has been stagnant ...
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1answer
52 views
Looking for an article in Behavioral Economics about Inequality
I have been searching for an article that I know exists, but somehow am unable to find.
The article is about an economic game where participants are assigned to a group, and can observe how much ...
