Income Inequality

In a new paper, Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet-Marx, and Suresh Naidu point to a shift in the Democratic Party’s economic policy, from predistribution to redistribution, as one of the reasons why it has lost less-educated voters.

In new research, Valentino Larcinese and Alberto Parmigiani find that the 1986 Reagan tax cuts led to greater campaign spending from wealthy individuals, who benefited the most from this policy. The authors argue that a very permissive system of political finance, combined with the erosion of tax progressivity, created the conditions for the mutual reinforcement of economic and political disparities. The result was an inequality spiral hardly compatible with democratic ideals.

Politicians and governments in the United States and elsewhere have recently proposed or implemented wealth taxes to supplement revenue and reduce wealth inequality. In a new study, Samira Marti, Isabel Z. Martínez, and Florian Scheuer show how decreases in wealth taxes led to increases in wealth inequality in Switzerland, though they find that these decreases alone are not enough to explain the magnitude of widening disparities.

Income inequality may exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases. In a new paper, Jay Bhattacharya, Joydeep Bhattacharya, and Min Kyong Kim examine the relationship between income inequality and the incidence and prevalence of tuberculosis across countries.

A new empirical study examines whether advancements in automation and robotics have affected intergenerational income mobility. The authors find that parents’ exposure to new...

A growing literature on income inequality and labor earnings has overlooked the contribution of disparities in hours worked. In new research with Lara Vivian,...

The US stands out among developed economies for its comparatively low level of redistribution as a percentage of GDP. Gustavo de Souza examines the...

New research on the effectiveness of protests on government distributions provides insights into the political incentives of a country’s leadership and the resulting economic...

ProMarket's first-ever Chart of the Week comes from a new paper that studies the underrepresentation gap of ethnic minorities in local US politics. In a...

A new working paper examines the relationship between competition policy and the decline in the labor share across the developed world and finds that...