The Journal of Economic Inequality最新文献

We examine employment effects of the COVID-19 crisis in Norway from March 2020 through June 2022: during the initial lockdown, through the subsequent recovery, and after the dust had settled. While we identify large and socially skewed effects of the crisis through its early phases, we find no long-term effects on employees exposed to early risk of job loss. For those employed at the onset of the pandemic, both the level and the socioeconomic composition of employment quickly returned to normal. In contrast, we find considerable negative long-term employment effects on people who were neither in employment nor in education when the crisis hit. We argue that these patterns can be explained by social insurance policies that gave priority to protecting existing jobs and to distribute benefits to those who were temporarily laid off. Given the extreme increase in the social insurance caseload, an almost unavoidable side-effect was reduced capacity for providing services to the already non-employed.

Inheritances matter for wealth accumulation and are often central to policy debates on wealth taxes. Using household level survey data, this paper shows that up to 2020 over one-third of households in Ireland had inherited wealth, the cumulative value of which (€97 billion) accounts for approximately one sixth of current net wealth for these households. However, the impact of inheritance extends beyond its direct value as inheritors tend to be wealthier, with a greater ownership of property. Our analysis shows that inheritances in Ireland contribute little to wealth inequality, and may even have reduced it over time, in line with existing findings for Britain and the United States. Tentative evidence suggests that mechanisms behind this wealth equalising effect may be (i) the importance of inheritances for the acquisition of property assets for middle-wealth households, (ii) the rise of asset prices, especially house prices, and (iii) substitution from employee income to rental income among inheritors.

Economic inequality and affective polarization are regarded as crucial factors impacting democratic resilience. However, studies on how the two phenomena are intertwined remain scarce and rely primarily on objective measures of economic inequality, overlooking the important role of subjective perceptions. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by empirically testing the link between perceptions of income inequality and affective polarization. In addition, we examine whether perceptions of income mobility moderate this relationship in such a way that perceptions of higher income mobility substitute the effect of perceived income inequality on affective polarization. To do so, we conducted a survey experiment (N = 2,717) with a factorial 2 (high vs. low income inequality) × 2 (high vs. low income mobility) design, in which we successfully modified income inequality and mobility perceptions. We find no significant effect of inequality perceptions on affective polarization and, as a consequence, no moderating role of income mobility perceptions in this relationship. Nevertheless, when income inequality is regarded to be high, the perceived level of income mobility seems to matter for the degree of affective polarization: Respondents are significantly more polarized in the high inequality and low mobility treatment than in the high inequality and high mobility treatment.

This paper examines whether the independence of central banks is related to income inequality and poverty. Following the 2008 financial crisis, independent central banks have been criticized that their actions contribute to an unequal income distribution. Yet, the case can also be made that such independence is orthogonal to income inequality or can even help mitigate it. As proxies for inequality, we employ five-year averages of the Gini coefficient and the poverty gap. Our database consists of a large set of countries, covering a long period. Our fixed effects panel estimates suggest that—despite many claims to the contrary—there is neither a robust relationship between central bank independence and the Gini coefficient nor between independence and the poverty gap. Several robustness checks (using alternative proxies for income inequality and central bank independence, interaction effects, quantile and cross-section regressions) confirm our finding.

In this article, we examine the association between family wealth and academic achievement and socioemotional behaviors of children ages 5 to 12. We examine whether wealth prior to birth and at ages 4 or 5 affects academic test scores and behavioral problems during two periods of childhood, ages 5 to 8 and ages 9 to 12, for a large and relatively recent cohort of children. We also examine associations between different forms of wealth (e.g., home equity) and child achievement and behaviors. Finally, we assess whether wealth prior to birth mediates racial/ethnic disparities in child achievement and disparities in achievement by maternal education/ability (AFQT). Results of our analysis indicate that wealth, particularly financial wealth that is the most liquid, has a modest positive association with achievement test scores. We also find that wealth is associated with fewer behavioral problems, but these results are less robust.

This study investigates the dispersion in days worked and wages using a novel semi-parametric specification that minimises assumptions about life-cycle labour income dynamics. After the age of 50, data in Italy show a substantial increase in the dispersion of percentage changes in income, which is remarkably driven by variations in days worked rather than wages. The results demonstrate that the rise is caused by highly persistent changes in the number of days worked. The study also presents an empirical strategy to decompose the cross-covariances of wages and working days to estimate the joint dynamics between the changes in permanent (transitory) wages and days worked. At the age of 28, a 1% increase in permanent wages increases permanent days worked by 0.45%; at the age of 55, the increase is approximately 0.25%. Despite the strong response of days of work to wage shocks early in careers, the correlation coefficients are weak, indicating that wages only explain a small share of variation in permanent days worked.

We produce estimates of the full distribution of all national income in Australia for the period 1991 to 2018, by combining household survey with administrative tax microdata and making adjustments to match National Accounts aggregates. We find that inequality of post-tax national income is lower and increased less than inequality of survey-based (post-transfer, disposable) income between 1991 and 2018. International comparisons reveal that Australian inequality is much lower than that of the United States, while it is similar to that of France, with those at the bottom of the income distribution faring noticeably better in France and Australia than in the US.

This paper deals with the fair ranking of allocations when individuals endowed with heterogeneous skills have other-regarding preferences over the average consumption of the other members of society. By assuming that such preferences matter for equality, we construct three social ordering functions that aim to reduce differences which originate in unequal productivities. These functions seek to maximise the smallest value of an interpersonally comparable measure of individual well-being that is related to a situation which involves neither unfair opportunities nor inequalities in consumption. More importantly, they provide society with different options at the time of making welfare evaluations when individuals are endowed with unequal productive skills and heterogeneous preferences.

This paper aims at providing new evidence about the link between personal and functional distribution and top-shares composition. We apply a novel class scheme based on two key features of contemporary capitalism i.e., individuals/households receiving multiple types of incomes, and the role of managers. The empirical application in Germany, Spain, and Italy over the period 2000–2017 reveals two main results. First, we observe a direct link between personal and functional distributions. A marginal increase in wages received by labourers would reduce inequality, whereas those received by capitalist households would increase it. Second, we find that a significant portion of labour income at the top of the income distribution corresponds to wages received by capitalist households. We conclude that although the linear correspondence between income source and class location is more blurred today than it was 200 years ago, a class divide is still clear and more prominent than what is often indicated in the literature.

This paper studies the relationship between Government´s economic ideology and income redistribution, using a panel of OECD countries spanning the years 2004–2020. Our results point to the existence of a partisan effect, showing that taxes and transfer policies implemented by parties on the left reduce income inequality more than those of parties on the right. Other political and electoral factors (the proximity of the elections, the number of years for which the chief executive has been in office, and the presence of coalitional and minority governments) do not seem to be as relevant. We also analyze the role that the Great Recession and the globalization process have played in the relationship between Government´s economic ideology and income redistribution, finding that they have significantly altered it.