Questions tagged [inequality]
Differences in resource allocations or opportunities that arise within or between countries.
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Deflated Consumption Data
I have been researching the literature of consumption inequality for my project. Most of the articles have deflated the consumption datasets, before measuring the inequalities with different indices. ...
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How do I derive a SWF from mean income and an inequality index?
If one makes welfarist assumptions about the general good, and further assumes that SWFs can be fully characterized by the mean income and an inequality index, then it is possible to recover the ...
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Would poorer countries be better off by cutting off all trade with rich countries?
This question is related to another thread, but rather than hijack that thread I am posting my angle on it here.
In relation to this Guardian quote
If we add theft through trade in services to the ...
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Ratio of two Jensen inequality
I have these pair of numbers
$ (a, b) = (\frac{4}{9}, \frac{1}{9}) $ and $(c, d) = (\frac{1}{2}, \frac{1}{6}) $. (Number mean nothing, just for illustration and simplification)
Note that - (a, b) are ...
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Literature exploring theoretically the relationship between inequality and economic growth
Specifically, I'd be very grateful if you may refer me to any literature treating wealth or income inequality or both, but the important thing is that it studies the relationship from a theoretical ...
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Signalling a relation
I have a very basic, trivial question to ask. (I apologise if it is not a worthy problem)
I have been trying to formulate an international Economics model where a larger country is trying to signal a ...
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Income inequality indices
I would be thankful for suggestions for standard inequality measurements such as Gini coefficient and Palma ratio. I would like to make a comparison across different countries simultaneously, hence I ...
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Modelling the inefficiency of redistribution in case of proportional taxation and lump-sum subsidy
I would like to model the following situation in the simplest possible way.
First, a government imposes a proportional tax on the whole population, say, x% of income for each household.
But then, it ...
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How can we judge whether an American middle class citizen is better off financially on a comparable salary strata as an Indian middle class citizen?
Given two citizens with comparable living standards in two countries, who would have a better life? A better life here is defined by a) how much they could save at the end of a fiscal year and b) ...
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Trying to figure out multiple regression analysis progressive taxation
I am trying to figure out how to run a multiple regression analysis with gini index as the dependent variable. Originally I planned to use top income tax rates (individual and corporate) as ...
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Is there a theory in economics about how companies have to withhold surplus goods or services for strategic reasons, creating artificial scarcity? [closed]
I have been thinking about how hotels and hostels have available rooms / beds, but they don’t give them away for free or a heavily discounted price; or how grocery stores and restaurants throw out ...
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Interpreting the regression results
This might be a basic question.
The article given below checks the relationship between crime and income inequality.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176508001110. Both crime and ...
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Do inheritances break Piketty's r>g model's conclusions?
In Capital in the Twenty-First Century Piketty suggests that if the return on capital is higher than the economic growth, then wealth inequality in society will rise.
Yet, this model seems to ignore ...
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The application of integration by parts involving the lorenz curve
I'm reading Atkinson's "On the measurement of inequality" and I'm having difficulties understanding how this paper is arriving at certain outcomes, using integration by parts. Let me first ...
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Is there a measure of social inequality?
A measure of economic inequality in a population is the gini coefficient.
Is there such a measure of social inequality as well?
The social rights include labor market, the source of income, health ...
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How much does generational wealth contributes to wealth inequality?
I've been reading about income/wealth inequality and the ways different countries (US/EU) are trying to solve this.
I've also learned about two rivaling points of view that can be expressed as follows:...
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Reason behind Pareto principle
Is Mathew effect or Pareto Principle are the laws of nature like Newton law of gravitation. What are the reason behind Pareto principle?
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What is the average global income in 2022?
2021 is also fine but I could only find old data. Median income may also be of value but I do not really believe in this metric.
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Sample size invariance of inequality measures
I am not an expert on inequality, so decided to drop this question. Suppose I analyze inequality of an outcome among different groups with Gini coefficient, I know that the scale of the outcome wouldn'...
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Can you classify EU countries into developing and industrialised, or are they all industrialised?
The Heckscher-Ohline model and Stolper-Samuelson theorem state that the relation between inequality and international trade is moderated by the level of economic development. I am studying this ...
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A question about "welfare independence"
I am working on some applications of measures of inequality (economic inequality). Upon reading a paper by Kolm (Kolm, S. C., Unequal Inequalities. I, Journal of Economic Theory, 12 pp 416-442, 1976) ...
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An updated version of oxfam top 1% wealth share evolution to 2021
In January 2015 oxfam allegedly published this graph:
Q: I'd like to see how that projection held up, by getting the updated data with a comparable methodology.
Here is the original document https://...
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Comparison of two variables
I have a model where I have to compare the values of y(x) and z(x).
But expressions are complex and what I am getting is
$x= f(y(x))= \frac{\sin({y(x)}) + \sqrt{(y(x))^3}}{(\frac{y(x)}{1-y(x)}) ^{1/4}}...
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What percentage of utils do the top 1% pay in tax
A commonly cited statistic in American politics is the top 1% of Americans earn 20% of all income, but may 40% of all income taxes. This is measured in dollars, however, and a dollar is worth more to ...
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Is it always a trade off between efficiency and equity?
Is there any situations where we can achieve both equity and efficiency?
I'm thinking of Covid 19 vaccine program which is run by Goverment. Although the cost for the program is paid by the money from ...
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Literature recommendation
Classic economic theory suggests people earn wages according to their productivity. Over time CEO's, directors, managers and the like seem to earn more relative to the 'normal worker'. Lets call this ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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