Some Fairly Recent Must- and Should-Reads About Economic Inequality
Alex Bell et al.: Who becomes an inventor in America? The importance of exposure to innovation: "Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records...
More and more it looks as though minimum wage laws—and unions—are positive second-best interventions that raise societal wellbeing by blunting the impact of employer monopsony: Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis: The Distributional Effects of Minimum Wages: "States and localities are increasingly experimenting with higher minimum wages in response to rising income inequality and stagnant economic mobility...
If you did not read this over at Equitable Growth Value Added a year and a half ago when it came out, you should go read it now: Emmanuel Saez (2016): Taxing the rich more—evidence from the 2013 federal tax increase: "In 2013, a surtax on high earners was levied to help pay for the Affordable Care Act at the same time as the 2001 tax cuts for high-income earners that were signed into law by President George W. Bush expired...
Katrine Jakobsen et al.: Wealth Taxation and Wealth Accumulation: Theory and Evidence from Denmark: "Denmark... the effects of wealth taxes... on wealth accumulation...
Thomas Piketty: Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017): "Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US...
Noah Smith: Why Money Managers Are Paid So Much Is a Mystery: "Mutual-fund managers are paid less for beating the market than for marketing—i.e., the ability to collect assets...
Michael Kremer (1993): The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development: "This paper proposes a production function describing processes subject to mistakes in any of several tasks...
Daniel Drezner: Saving Speaker Ryan?: "Now is normally the time when the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts would bolster a counterintuitive defense of Ryan’s speakership...
David E. Broockman et al.: The Political Behavior of Wealthy Americans: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs: "American politics overrepresents the wealthy. But what policies do the wealthy support?...
Thomas Piketty (2015): Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century: "until 1914, the French elite often justified its strong opposition to the creation of a progressive income tax by referring to the principles of the French Revolution...
Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “Gluts, booms, and crashes” edition: "Michael Gee looks at troubling data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...
Greg Leiserson: U.S. Inequality and Recent Tax Changes: "Distribution tables provide a first-order approximation to the change in welfare...
Andrew Carnegie (1889): Wealth: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth...
Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: “diminishing demand” edition: "The Family and Medical Leave Act... notes former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin...
Adrien Auclert and Matthew Rognlie: Inequality and aggregate demand: "We explore the transmission mechanism of income inequality to output...
Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers: On the link between US pay and productivity: "More rapid technological progress should cause faster productivity growth...
Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman: Inequality is not inevitable–but the US 'experiment' is a recipe for divergence: "Income inequality has increased in nearly every country around the world since 1980–but at very different speeds...
Hans and Ola Rosling: Author: Ignorance: "The mission of Gapminder Foundation is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand...
Dylan Matthews: In defense of Social Security Disability Insurance: "When Americans get too sick or injured to work, this program helps them survive...
Susan Houseman: Understanding the [Post-2000] Decline in Manufacturing Employment: "How did so many people erroneously point to automation as the culprit? It was, Houseman said...
Mike Males: The Truth About Teen Suicide: "Trend[s] in suicide rates among teens... track... trend among... adults...
Jeffrey Frankel: Does Trade Fuel Inequality?
Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer: The effect of minimum wages on the total number of jobs: Evidence from the United States using a bunching estimator: "Comparing the excess number of jobs just above the new minimum wage following an increase to the reduction in the number of jobs below the minimum...
Peter Whoriskey: ‘I hope I can quit working in a few years’: A preview of the U.S. without pensions: "Tom Coomer, 79... used to work at the McDonnell Douglas plant in Tulsa before it closed in 1994...
Simon Wren-Lewis: mainly macro: Minimum Wages, Monopsony and Towns: "Empirical work clearly shows plenty of examples where imposing or increasing minimum wages did not reduce employment...
