Income Inequality

Consumers are anxious about the economy, and it’s due not only to inflation but to market power that raises prices and reduces quality, variety, and innovation. Policymakers’ prescriptions for resolving the cost-of-living crisis have mostly ignored the role of antitrust policy, but waning competition is at the heart of these problems, writes Diana L. Moss.

The transaction fees that businesses incur using credit and debit cards cost Americans billions of dollars each year. Despite the availability of alternative, cheaper account-to-account options that cut out the middleman, Americans have been slow to move away from card payment systems due to market mechanisms that hide the true costs of card transactions to consumers, writes Eli Orbach.

In new research, Blake Jackson and Ilya Strebulaev track the careers of 100,000 people working at venture capital firms in the United States to ask which investors succeed and why. They find that five percent of VCs generate 90 percent of the industry's profits, that the backgrounds investors bring with them predict who ends up in that group, and that public recognition itself opens the doors to the deals that keep them at the top.

Matthew Lucky reviews The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, now out at Henry Holt and Co.

Wealth taxes can make capital markets more efficient when they are optimally combined with lower capital gains taxes, argue Sergio Ocampo, Guttorm Schjelderup, and Floris Zoutman in new research.

The OxyContin epidemic had large demographic effects on communities in the United States. In new research, Carolina Arteaga, Victoria Barone, and Stephen Claassen find that Purdue Pharma’s marketing strategy targeted specific areas, causing college-educated residents to flee and increasing fertility rates among the most affected populations.

California’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires will struggle to accurately value and tax the wealth of California’s richest. Rather than fund the state’s massive budgetary commitments, the bill may drive away its largest taxpayers, write Ray Ball and Andrew Sutherland.

In new research, Grace Fan, Trung Nguyen, and Xi Wu show how improvements in government data transparency and disclosure through the public rollout of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool enabled civil society to identify and hold polluters responsible and improve overall environmental justice.

Matt Lucky reviews The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix it by Arindrajit Dube, now out at Penguin Press.

In new research, Ben Bates examines the recent wave of funds designed to open private markets to retail investors. Such funds both underreport volatility and perform worse than comparable funds aimed at wealthier investors.