Questions tagged [inequality]
Differences in resource allocations or opportunities that arise within or between countries.
110
questions
1
vote
0answers
35 views
Can we pursue the goals of environmental sustainability and reduction of income inequality at the same time?
Environmentalists tell us to reduce our carbon footprint by, among other things, reducing our traveling and consumption of long-hauled goods. But people living in small-market export-oriented ...
0
votes
0answers
15 views
Can the monetary policy affect wealth inequality? [duplicate]
I think that it is often assumed that monetary policies have little or no impact on inequality.
At least in the public the monetary policy is not seen as a political question the same way that fiscal ...
-6
votes
0answers
106 views
Since the rich are better positioned to grow their incomes, inequality will get worse. Is there's anything we can do about this? [closed]
How do you shrink income gaps if those at the bottom naturally have less possibility to generate money than those at the top (on individual and global levels)? That is, how do you solve this ...
1
vote
1answer
57 views
Could the Feds objectives be adjusted to decrease or at least not increase wealth inequality?
The US congress "has assigned the Fed to conduct the nation’s monetary policy to support the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."(1)
It seems ...
19
votes
5answers
8k views
Why do many occupations show a gender bias?
Yesterday we had a question about the alleged underpayment of women in work, asking why employers would hire fewer cheaper female workers and would instead hire a larger number of expensive male ...
86
votes
9answers
17k views
If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?
If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women? Do employers decide to lose profits just out of sexism, in feminists' and researchers' opinion? It doesn't make sense to ...
18
votes
6answers
6k views
How does everyone not become poor over time?
Look at the whole world --the union of all goods and services and workers and customers. Everyone who is a customer is a worker somewhere (they had to get the money to be a customer somehow). But not ...
1
vote
1answer
96 views
Is it viable to put a cap on personal wealth in the U.S.?
Setting a cap on personal wealth is a proposal that has been championed by several progressive politicians in the U.S. (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, etc.). From what I understand, they argue that by ...
0
votes
3answers
109 views
Is inequality a micro or macro economics issue?
In a clear and comprehensive blog post, Tejvan Pettinger describes economics problems. He starts by making brief considerations on scarcity, enumerates the fundamental economic problems (what/how much ...
1
vote
1answer
46 views
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 ...
0
votes
2answers
60 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 ...
1
vote
0answers
24 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 ...
0
votes
1answer
39 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, ...
2
votes
2answers
82 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 ...
1
vote
1answer
39 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 ...
2
votes
2answers
101 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 ...
1
vote
1answer
43 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, ...
0
votes
0answers
17 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 ...
1
vote
1answer
268 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 (...
2
votes
1answer
72 views
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, ...
3
votes
1answer
146 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.
...
1
vote
2answers
72 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 ...
0
votes
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?
0
votes
0answers
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 ...
0
votes
1answer
45 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 ...
1
vote
1answer
22 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" (...
0
votes
1answer
105 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 ...
0
votes
0answers
54 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 ...
0
votes
1answer
39 views
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 ...
0
votes
1answer
31 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.
...
1
vote
1answer
82 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 ...
0
votes
0answers
34 views
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 ...
0
votes
0answers
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 ...
1
vote
0answers
30 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 ...
1
vote
1answer
58 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 ...
2
votes
1answer
105 views
What is the relationship between economic growth and equality?
Does economic growth create more or less equality?
0
votes
1answer
90 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 ...
4
votes
2answers
1k 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 ...
1
vote
0answers
31 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 ...
1
vote
1answer
18 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 ...
0
votes
2answers
79 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 ...
1
vote
0answers
16 views
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 ...
1
vote
1answer
126 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,...
1
vote
0answers
60 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 ...
1
vote
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 ...
2
votes
0answers
49 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 ...
4
votes
0answers
45 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 ...
-1
votes
2answers
53 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 "...
2
votes
1answer
119 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-...
2
votes
4answers
180 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 ...
