In an interview with ProMarket, Open University’s Peter Bloom talks about his provocative new book CEO Society and why he believes celebrating corporate CEOs too much erodes democratic values.
Read more
Do Wages in High-Earning Sectors Always Reflect Skills?
Did the soaring wages in finance go in hand with a better selection of talented individuals into the sector? The evidence suggests no.
Read more
How US Voters React to Immigration in the Voting Booth May Depend on Both Immigrants’ and Native Residents’ Skill Levels
A new working paper has revealed two strikingly divergent correlations between increases in high-skilled and low-skilled immigration and change in Republican vote share since 1994.
Read more
Gabriel Zucman: “Some People in Economics Feel That Talking About Inequality Is Not What Economists Should Be Doing”
The rising scholar of taxation and inequality talks to ProMarket about the problems excessive economic power poses for open political systems, how states can tackle profit-shifting, and critics who have dismissed his work on distributional issues as “a French economics.”
Read more
Education Quality Has Less to Do with Adult Outcomes Than You Might Think
A new paper assesses the contributions of education and labor markets to differences across regional labor markets in the United States and finds that differences in access to high-quality elementary and secondary schools are not a key channel driving the strength of the association between parents’ incomes and their children’s incomes when they reach adulthood.
Read more
Excessive Zoning Makes Us Poorer and More Unequal
We normally think of income inequality as a function of differences in class or socioeconomic status. But much more than generally realized, geographic differences are a major source of inequality as well, argue Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in this extract from their new book The Captured Economy.
Read more
Why Democracy Fails to Reduce Inequality: Blame the Brahmin Left
A new paper by Thomas Piketty finds that major parties on both sides of the political spectrum have been captured by elites and warns of a future political system that pits “globalists” against “nativists.”
Read more
Investing in Quality Early Childcare Is Good for Vulnerable Kids—and Good Economics, Too
Early childcare can be a major contributor to eliminating inequality of opportunity and even lay the foundations for a more productive workforce in the future.
Read more
How India’s Bridal Dowry Tradition Leads to Missing Women
In a famous essay published in 1990 the economist Amartya Sen explored the drivers of the global sex ratio imbalance, what he called the problem of “missing women.” A new CEPR discussion paper revisits this question and traces variation in sex ratios in India to changes in the price of gold, used for bridal dowries.
Read more
Angus Deaton on the Under-Discussed Driver of Inequality in America: “It’s Easier for Rent-Seekers to Affect Policy Here Than In Much of Europe”
In an interview with ProMarket, Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton talks about the connection of rent-seeking and monopolization to rising inequality.
Read more
Is Economic Insecurity Behind the Specter of Populism?
A new study examines the role of the 2007–9 global financial crisis and its metastasis in Europe on voting and political beliefs, showing that crisis-driven economic insecurity is a substantial driver of populism and political distrust.
Read more
The Rate of Return on Everything
A new paper purports to have finally unlocked the mystery of the rate of return on capital. Here the authors report on their research on an enormous data set on asset returns for 16 advanced economies from 1870 to 2015 and provide surprising insight into the relationship between long-run growth and capital—a connection that has occupied thinkers from Mill to Marx to Piketty and many others to this day.
Read more