The scholarly literature on the eviction legal system has repeatedly concluded that eviction courts are courts of mass settlement. Landlords’ attorneys pressure unrepresented tenants into signing settlement agreements in the court hallways in a factory-like process, and judges approve the agreements with a perfunctory rubber stamp. Yet while we know most eviction cases settle, no one has asked, much less answered, the salient follow-up question: what are the terms of these settlements? Based on the results of a rigorous study of a representative sample of eviction cases, this Article answers that question, and in doing so, generates a novel theory about the eviction legal system. The Article demonstrates empirically that the substantial majority of eviction settlements in the study jurisdiction contain a distinct set of interlocking terms that amount to what the Article labels “civil probation.” Civil probation is the civil analog in the eviction context to probation in the criminal context. Specifically, it is the imposition of court-ordered conditions on a person’s tenancy that, if violated, can result in swift eviction with few procedural safeguards. This Article is the first to conceptualize the phenomenon of civil probation and identify its existence in the eviction legal system. Through detailed data analysis, the Article empirically documents the prevalence of civil probation and describes its key features in the study jurisdiction. The Article then advocates for a new understanding of the eviction legal system as a whole through analysis of civil probation’s consequences. First, a shadow legal system exists that operates alongside the statutory system that formally governs eviction proceedings. This shadow system undermines the rule of law and threatens public regulatory enforcement. Second, an ideology of control underlies the eviction legal system. Landlords, through the imposition of civil probation, use eviction filings not simply to recover possession or to collect rent, but rather as mechanisms to more tightly control, monitor, and regulate their tenants’ conduct. And third, a phenomenon of “net-widening” of the eviction legal system is likely occurring, akin to the phenomenon that scholars have documented in the context of criminal probation. Civil probation motivates landlords to initiate eviction filings they would not initiate otherwise, and in doing so expands the reach and scope of the eviction legal system. The Article offers specific recommendations for reform based on these conclusions.
{"title":"Civil Probation","authors":"Nicole M. Summers","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3897493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3897493","url":null,"abstract":"The scholarly literature on the eviction legal system has repeatedly concluded that eviction courts are courts of mass settlement. Landlords’ attorneys pressure unrepresented tenants into signing settlement agreements in the court hallways in a factory-like process, and judges approve the agreements with a perfunctory rubber stamp. Yet while we know most eviction cases settle, no one has asked, much less answered, the salient follow-up question: what are the terms of these settlements? Based on the results of a rigorous study of a representative sample of eviction cases, this Article answers that question, and in doing so, generates a novel theory about the eviction legal system. The Article demonstrates empirically that the substantial majority of eviction settlements in the study jurisdiction contain a distinct set of interlocking terms that amount to what the Article labels “civil probation.” Civil probation is the civil analog in the eviction context to probation in the criminal context. Specifically, it is the imposition of court-ordered conditions on a person’s tenancy that, if violated, can result in swift eviction with few procedural safeguards. This Article is the first to conceptualize the phenomenon of civil probation and identify its existence in the eviction legal system. Through detailed data analysis, the Article empirically documents the prevalence of civil probation and describes its key features in the study jurisdiction. The Article then advocates for a new understanding of the eviction legal system as a whole through analysis of civil probation’s consequences. First, a shadow legal system exists that operates alongside the statutory system that formally governs eviction proceedings. This shadow system undermines the rule of law and threatens public regulatory enforcement. Second, an ideology of control underlies the eviction legal system. Landlords, through the imposition of civil probation, use eviction filings not simply to recover possession or to collect rent, but rather as mechanisms to more tightly control, monitor, and regulate their tenants’ conduct. And third, a phenomenon of “net-widening” of the eviction legal system is likely occurring, akin to the phenomenon that scholars have documented in the context of criminal probation. Civil probation motivates landlords to initiate eviction filings they would not initiate otherwise, and in doing so expands the reach and scope of the eviction legal system. The Article offers specific recommendations for reform based on these conclusions.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132172776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We conduct the first dedicated study of absolute income mobility in Australia, for 1950-2019. About two-thirds of 30-34 year-olds have higher real incomes than their parents did at the same age, and this has been stable for 25 years. This is among the highest levels of absolute mobility in the world. Nevertheless, mobility was considerably higher for baby-boomers (over 80% had higher incomes than their parents). About two-thirds of this decline in mobility is due to lower income growth. The remainder is due to rising inequality. The mobility estimate is higher (78%) when income is adjusted (equivalised) for family size.
{"title":"Are We Richer Than Our Parents Were? Absolute Income Mobility in Australia","authors":"Tomas Kennedy, P. Siminski","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3858188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3858188","url":null,"abstract":"We conduct the first dedicated study of absolute income mobility in Australia, for 1950-2019. About two-thirds of 30-34 year-olds have higher real incomes than their parents did at the same age, and this has been stable for 25 years. This is among the highest levels of absolute mobility in the world. Nevertheless, mobility was considerably higher for baby-boomers (over 80% had higher incomes than their parents). About two-thirds of this decline in mobility is due to lower income growth. The remainder is due to rising inequality. The mobility estimate is higher (78%) when income is adjusted (equivalised) for family size.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124192051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ashish Sedai, T. Jamasb, Rabindra Nepal, Ray Miller
Abstract Uneven electrification can be a source of welfare disparity. Given the recent progress of electrification in India, we analyze the differences in access and reliability of electricity, and its impact on household welfare for marginalized and dominant social groups by caste and religion. We carry out longitudinal analysis from a national survey, 2005–2012, using OLS, fixed effects and panel instrumental variable regressions. Our analysis shows that marginalized groups (Hindu SC/ST and Muslims) had higher likelihood of electricity access compared to the dominant groups (Hindu forward castes and OBC). In terms of electricity reliability, in a period when the all households lost electricity hours, marginalized groups lost less electricity hours in a day as compared to domi- nant groups. Results showed that electrification enabled marginalized households to increase their consumption, assets and move out of poverty, but the effect was smaller as compared to dominant groups. Overall, the effects were more pronounced in rural areas. The findings are robust to alternative ways of measuring consumption, and other robustness checks. We posit that electrification increased household welfare of marginalized groups, but did not reduce absolute disparities among social groups.
{"title":"Electrification and Welfare for the Marginalized: Evidence from India","authors":"Ashish Sedai, T. Jamasb, Rabindra Nepal, Ray Miller","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3782125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3782125","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Uneven electrification can be a source of welfare disparity. Given the recent progress of electrification in India, we analyze the differences in access and reliability of electricity, and its impact on household welfare for marginalized and dominant social groups by caste and religion. We carry out longitudinal analysis from a national survey, 2005–2012, using OLS, fixed effects and panel instrumental variable regressions. Our analysis shows that marginalized groups (Hindu SC/ST and Muslims) had higher likelihood of electricity access compared to the dominant groups (Hindu forward castes and OBC). In terms of electricity reliability, in a period when the all households lost electricity hours, marginalized groups lost less electricity hours in a day as compared to domi- nant groups. Results showed that electrification enabled marginalized households to increase their consumption, assets and move out of poverty, but the effect was smaller as compared to dominant groups. Overall, the effects were more pronounced in rural areas. The findings are robust to alternative ways of measuring consumption, and other robustness checks. We posit that electrification increased household welfare of marginalized groups, but did not reduce absolute disparities among social groups.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125841765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why are some cities much more well-endowed in public goods than others? I argue that the degree of socioeconomic segregation largely explains the formation of preferences for public goods. Socioeconomically integrated (non-segregated) cities have a higher incidence of the negative spatial externalities of inequality (e.g., crime, contamination) that spill over from impoverished localities. Such neighborhood effects, in turn, increase the neighboring middle-class' preferences for certain public goods that address them, while decreasing the perceived relative efficacy of private solutions (e.g., private guards). Thus, socioeconomic integration - through the spatial externalities mechanism - enables preference convergence on the public provision of services in place of private options. In contrast, segregation polarizes the urban electorate along class lines. To test the argument, I propose a novel instrument for segregation that interacts rural-to-urban predicted migration (shift-share instrument) of the poor with the destination locality's "urban form." I combine this quasi-experimental strategy with census area-level measures of class- and race-based segregation and an original face-to-face survey with over 4,000 households across 408 of the 456 census areas in the megacity of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Using embedded mechanism experiments, I show that the spatial externalities mechanism is empirically distinct from alternative mechanisms - racial prejudice, social affinity, contact hypothesis - proposed in the literature.
{"title":"Segregation and the Spatial Externalities of Inequality: A Theory of Collateral Cooperation for Public Goods in Cities","authors":"A. Xu","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3701099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3701099","url":null,"abstract":"Why are some cities much more well-endowed in public goods than others? I argue that the degree of socioeconomic segregation largely explains the formation of preferences for public goods. Socioeconomically integrated (non-segregated) cities have a higher incidence of the negative spatial externalities of inequality (e.g., crime, contamination) that spill over from impoverished localities. Such neighborhood effects, in turn, increase the neighboring middle-class' preferences for certain public goods that address them, while decreasing the perceived relative efficacy of private solutions (e.g., private guards). Thus, socioeconomic integration - through the spatial externalities mechanism - enables preference convergence on the public provision of services in place of private options. In contrast, segregation polarizes the urban electorate along class lines. To test the argument, I propose a novel instrument for segregation that interacts rural-to-urban predicted migration (shift-share instrument) of the poor with the destination locality's \"urban form.\" I combine this quasi-experimental strategy with census area-level measures of class- and race-based segregation and an original face-to-face survey with over 4,000 households across 408 of the 456 census areas in the megacity of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Using embedded mechanism experiments, I show that the spatial externalities mechanism is empirically distinct from alternative mechanisms - racial prejudice, social affinity, contact hypothesis - proposed in the literature.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130496214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since 2018, the Liman Center at Yale Law School and Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program (CJPP), in partnership with the Fines & Fees Justice Center and the Berkeley Law Policy Advocacy Clinic, have collaborated to mitigate the problems faced by people of limited means and resources who interact with criminal punishment systems around the United States. Through a series of workshops and materials, we have examined how law has enabled and, on occasion, limited these harms, experienced disproportionately by communities of color. Budget pressures are part of what drives state and local governments to rely on monetary sanctions. Reform efforts have, at times, been stymied by arguments that governments “need” the money generated by regressive fines and fees. In 2008, during and after the Great Recession, state and local governments responded to sudden budget pressures by searching for new streams of revenues—including from a host of legal assessments. Given that experience, we know that the economic disruptions created by the current COVID-19 crisis will likely result in governments’ considering additional use of monetary sanctions and “user” fee financing to generate revenue. The current economic constraints place strains on subnational budgets even more acute than those experienced a dozen years ago. Thus, we fear that governments may scale up the imposition and the enforcement of monetary sanctions. More tools are needed to resist these efforts, as the economic effects of the pandemic will frame the years to come. Knowledge of subnational systems of taxing and budgeting and of fiscal policymaking processes can be put to use to reduce and to end governments’ reliance on user fees for courts and for other aspects of criminal systems. This reader aims to help experts in public finance to understand the misuse of court-based assessments which are regressive revenue streams. Subsequent volumes will provide a primer on public finance for people knowledgeable about the law and practices of unfair monetary sanctions through an overview of how money is collected and allocated at the state and local level. These materials interact with ongoing seminars, sometimes virtual, to link people expert in public finance with their counterparts seeking to reform unfair monetary sanctions. Through monographs such as this, we hope to support work underway to shape just and equitable revenue-generation mechanisms that avoid imposing harmful costs on vulnerable individuals, families, and communities.
{"title":"Fees, Fines, and the Funding of Public Services: A Curriculum for Reform","authors":"B. Highsmith","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3681001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3681001","url":null,"abstract":"Since 2018, the Liman Center at Yale Law School and Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program (CJPP), in partnership with the Fines & Fees Justice Center and the Berkeley Law Policy Advocacy Clinic, have collaborated to mitigate the problems faced by people of limited means and resources who interact with criminal punishment systems around the United States. Through a series of workshops and materials, we have examined how law has enabled and, on occasion, limited these harms, experienced disproportionately by communities of color. \u0000 \u0000Budget pressures are part of what drives state and local governments to rely on monetary sanctions. Reform efforts have, at times, been stymied by arguments that governments “need” the money generated by regressive fines and fees. In 2008, during and after the Great Recession, state and local governments responded to sudden budget pressures by searching for new streams of revenues—including from a host of legal assessments. Given that experience, we know that the economic disruptions created by the current COVID-19 crisis will likely result in governments’ considering additional use of monetary sanctions and “user” fee financing to generate revenue. The current economic constraints place strains on subnational budgets even more acute than those experienced a dozen years ago. Thus, we fear that governments may scale up the imposition and the enforcement of monetary sanctions. More tools are needed to resist these efforts, as the economic effects of the pandemic will frame the years to come. \u0000 \u0000Knowledge of subnational systems of taxing and budgeting and of fiscal policymaking processes can be put to use to reduce and to end governments’ reliance on user fees for courts and for other aspects of criminal systems. This reader aims to help experts in public finance to understand the misuse of court-based assessments which are regressive revenue streams. Subsequent volumes will provide a primer on public finance for people knowledgeable about the law and practices of unfair monetary sanctions through an overview of how money is collected and allocated at the state and local level. \u0000 \u0000These materials interact with ongoing seminars, sometimes virtual, to link people expert in public \u0000finance with their counterparts seeking to reform unfair monetary sanctions. Through monographs such as this, we hope to support work underway to shape just and equitable revenue-generation mechanisms that avoid imposing harmful costs on vulnerable individuals, families, and communities.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131980574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pay gaps for women and minorities have persisted after accounting for observable differences. Why? If employers can access applicants’ salary histories while bargaining over wages, they can take advantage of past inequities, perpetuating inequality. Recently, a dozen US states have banned employer access to salary histories. We analyze the effects of these salary history bans (SHBs) on employer wage posting and on the pay of job changers in a difference-in-differences design. Following SHBs, employers posted wages more often and increased pay for job changers by about 5%, with larger increases for women (8%) and African-Americans (13%). Salary histories appear to account for much of the persistence of residual wage gaps.
{"title":"Perpetuating Inequality: What Salary History Bans Reveal About Wages","authors":"James Bessen, Chen Meng, Erich Denk","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3628729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3628729","url":null,"abstract":"Pay gaps for women and minorities have persisted after accounting for observable differences. Why? If employers can access applicants’ salary histories while bargaining over wages, they can take advantage of past inequities, perpetuating inequality. Recently, a dozen US states have banned employer access to salary histories. We analyze the effects of these salary history bans (SHBs) on employer wage posting and on the pay of job changers in a difference-in-differences design. Following SHBs, employers posted wages more often and increased pay for job changers by about 5%, with larger increases for women (8%) and African-Americans (13%). Salary histories appear to account for much of the persistence of residual wage gaps.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"123 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116231570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
No longer the poor cousin of civil rights, socio-economic rights have steadily found a place in constitutions and jurisprudence across the world. Asia represents, however, a paradox in this development. While the sub-region of South Asia was the site of many early social rights adjudication experiments, East and South-East Asia are only outmatched by Arab States in their reluctance to recognize and judicialize socio-economic rights (and even the right to property). Fitting seamlessly with the region’s embedded mercantilist model of capitalism, it is the most conservative region in the world when it comes to core rights in the workplace – such as the right to strike or fair wage. Courts are held generally on a tight constitutional leash with limited recognition of the judiciary’s competence to enforce socio-economic rights and judges have been less willing than their South Asian counterparts to break constitutional lines. While some features are consistent across the entire region, such as hostility to international oversight of socio-economic rights, there is significant variation in terms of ESR entrenchment and interpretation. In this chapter, we analyze the macro patterns of constitutional recognition and judicial posture across the region (mostly with the help of the TIESR database) and some of the key patterns and puzzles in constitutional enforcement across the region. We conclude with some reflections on the impact of constitutionalising ESR rights in the region in light of the existing empirical evidence.
{"title":"Economic and Social Rights","authors":"M. Langford, E. Rosevear","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3595167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3595167","url":null,"abstract":"No longer the poor cousin of civil rights, socio-economic rights have steadily found a place in constitutions and jurisprudence across the world. Asia represents, however, a paradox in this development. While the sub-region of South Asia was the site of many early social rights adjudication experiments, East and South-East Asia are only outmatched by Arab States in their reluctance to recognize and judicialize socio-economic rights (and even the right to property). Fitting seamlessly with the region’s embedded mercantilist model of capitalism, it is the most conservative region in the world when it comes to core rights in the workplace – such as the right to strike or fair wage. Courts are held generally on a tight constitutional leash with limited recognition of the judiciary’s competence to enforce socio-economic rights and judges have been less willing than their South Asian counterparts to break constitutional lines. While some features are consistent across the entire region, such as hostility to international oversight of socio-economic rights, there is significant variation in terms of ESR entrenchment and interpretation. In this chapter, we analyze the macro patterns of constitutional recognition and judicial posture across the region (mostly with the help of the TIESR database) and some of the key patterns and puzzles in constitutional enforcement across the region. We conclude with some reflections on the impact of constitutionalising ESR rights in the region in light of the existing empirical evidence. <br>","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124325301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The coronavirus pandemic is creating overwhelming needs, in three waves. First is the health crisis; second is the macroeconomic crisis created by the abrupt halt in much business activity; and now third is a consumer crisis, as households are faced with total or partial job loss, sharp income decline, and potential loss of health care. Millions of Americans are falling behind on their bills, including major obligations like mortgages, rent, car payments, and other forms of household debt. At the same time, they face a financial industry itself struggling to respond to the compounding crises and widespread confusion as to what the new rules of the road are as financial institutions, states, localities, and the federal government scramble to respond. The result is fertile ground for consumer scams. The authors call upon the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to recognize and respond to this new consumer crisis, providing an action plan of more than a dozen practical steps that the CFPB can and must take immediately to prevent widespread consumer harm. The action plan starts with the most basic and essential step of collecting and disseminating timely and accurate information for both consumers and policymakers. The CFPB must address pressing consumer risks in four primary areas: foreclosure prevention, non-mortgage debt forbearance, oversight of debt collectors, and supervision of credit reporting companies. In each of these primary areas, and on all the issues discussed in this paper, the CFPB must use all of its authorities to ensure that crucial relief is delivered to distressed consumers.
{"title":"Consumer Financial Protection in the COVID-19 Crisis: An Emergency Agenda","authors":"Richard Cordray, D. Thompson, C. Peterson","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3569357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3569357","url":null,"abstract":"The coronavirus pandemic is creating overwhelming needs, in three waves. First is the health crisis; second is the macroeconomic crisis created by the abrupt halt in much business activity; and now third is a consumer crisis, as households are faced with total or partial job loss, sharp income decline, and potential loss of health care. Millions of Americans are falling behind on their bills, including major obligations like mortgages, rent, car payments, and other forms of household debt. At the same time, they face a financial industry itself struggling to respond to the compounding crises and widespread confusion as to what the new rules of the road are as financial institutions, states, localities, and the federal government scramble to respond. The result is fertile ground for consumer scams. The authors call upon the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to recognize and respond to this new consumer crisis, providing an action plan of more than a dozen practical steps that the CFPB can and must take immediately to prevent widespread consumer harm. The action plan starts with the most basic and essential step of collecting and disseminating timely and accurate information for both consumers and policymakers. The CFPB must address pressing consumer risks in four primary areas: foreclosure prevention, non-mortgage debt forbearance, oversight of debt collectors, and supervision of credit reporting companies. In each of these primary areas, and on all the issues discussed in this paper, the CFPB must use all of its authorities to ensure that crucial relief is delivered to distressed consumers.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126175593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper examines the dynamics of wealth and income inequality along the business cycle and assesses how they are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016 we find that on average income inequality - measured by the Gini coefficient - is countercyclical and also shows a significant association with the capital share. Up on a closer look, we find that a remarkable share of one third of all countries display a rather pro- or acyclical relationship. In order to understand the underlying cyclical dynamics of inequality we incorporate distributive shocks, modeled as exogenous changes in the capital share, into a real business cycle model, where agents are ex-ante heterogeneous with respect to wealth and ability. We show how to derive standard inequality measures within this framework, which allow us to analyze how productivity and distributive shocks affect both, the macroeconomic variables and the personal income and wealth distribution over the business cycle. We find that whether wealth and income inequality in the model behaves countercyclical or not depends on two aspects. The intertemporal elasticity of substitution and the persistence of the shocks. We use Bayesian techniques in order to match GDP, capital share and consumption to quarterly U.S. data. The resulting parameter estimates point towards a non-monotonic relationship between productivity fluctuations and inequality. On impact, inequality increases in response to TFP shocks but declines in later periods. This pattern is consistent with the empirically observed relationship in the USA. Furthermore, we find that TFP shocks explain about 17 percent of the cyclical fluctuations in inequality in the USA.
{"title":"Inequality over the Business Cycle – The Role of Distributive Shocks","authors":"M. Clemens, Ulrich Eydam, Maik Heinemann","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3556388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3556388","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the dynamics of wealth and income inequality along the business cycle and assesses how they are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016 we find that on average income inequality - measured by the Gini coefficient - is countercyclical and also shows a significant association with the capital share. Up on a closer look, we find that a remarkable share of one third of all countries display a rather pro- or acyclical relationship. In order to understand the underlying cyclical dynamics of inequality we incorporate distributive shocks, modeled as exogenous changes in the capital share, into a real business cycle model, where agents are ex-ante heterogeneous with respect to wealth and ability. We show how to derive standard inequality measures within this framework, which allow us to analyze how productivity and distributive shocks affect both, the macroeconomic variables and the personal income and wealth distribution over the business cycle. We find that whether wealth and income inequality in the model behaves countercyclical or not depends on two aspects. The intertemporal elasticity of substitution and the persistence of the shocks. We use Bayesian techniques in order to match GDP, capital share and consumption to quarterly U.S. data. The resulting parameter estimates point towards a non-monotonic relationship between productivity fluctuations and inequality. On impact, inequality increases in response to TFP shocks but declines in later periods. This pattern is consistent with the empirically observed relationship in the USA. Furthermore, we find that TFP shocks explain about 17 percent of the cyclical fluctuations in inequality in the USA.","PeriodicalId":306856,"journal":{"name":"Economic Inequality & the Law eJournal","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125837306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Burris, Katie Moran-McCabe, Nadya Prood, K. Blankenship, Angus Corbett, A. Gutman, Bethany Saxon
This report is the fourth in a series of reports exploring the role of law in housing equity and innovative uses of law to improve health equity through housing. The reports are based on extensive literature scans and semi-structured interviews with people who are taking action in housing policy and practice. The full series includes: Report I: A Vision of Health Equity in Housing; Report II: Legal Levers for Health Equity in Housing: A Systems Approach; Report III: Health Equity in Housing: Evidence and Evidence Gaps; Report IV: Creative People and Places Building Health Equity in Housing; Report V: Governing Health Equity in Housing; and Report VI: Health Equity through Housing: A Blueprint for Systematic Legal Action. This report explores ten themes identified through interviews with the people on the ground — the lawyers, researchers, civil rights advocates, community development executives, and affordable housing professionals — who are taking action to build health equity in housing in the US. After cataloging the evidence on the impact of legal levers in our third report, we wanted to learn what practitioners in the field and leading researchers thought about the use of legal levers for health equity in housing: what works, what doesn’t, and what might be tried next? Some of the themes that emerged from our conversations are: the interconnectedness of housing with other domains like transportation, community development and education; the failure of housing laws to protect vulnerable populations and eliminate segregation; and the need for better enforcement of useful levers and more resources to promote health equity in housing.
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