Inequality & Distribution

John Kay shares findings from his new book, Other People’s Money, and his insights on changing the financial sector.

Economists’ assumptions, even about seemingly “small” matters, make an enormous difference to global poverty estimates but their impact often goes unnoticed, and the choices made have been badly justified. We must stop pretending that the World Bank’s “$1 per day” estimates are at all reliable.

We provide an explanation for the large spatial wage disparities and low male migration in India based on the trade-off between consumption-smoothing, provided by caste-based rural insurance networks, and the income-gains from migration.

Professor Heckman was invited to speak at the HDCA 2015 Conference as the keynote speaker for the Amartya Sen Lecture. The presentation offered recent research on the economics of creating flourishing lives, discussing the importance of cognitive skills, character skills and health.

Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford researcher Max Roser recently collaborated with world famous Swedish statistical showman Hans Rosling on the upcoming documentary ‘Don’t Panic: How To End Poverty In 15 Years’.

US household wealth concentration is not likely to decline in response to fiscal interventions alone.

A little-understood rule in the tax code is making headlines. What’s all the fuss?

Comparing outcomes for biological and adopted children sheds light on the intergenerational transmission of wealth.

Tony Atkinson’s new book points the way forward.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has awarded $2 million in grants to fund 21 different projects as part of the latest round of its research grant program.

A four percent growth goal for first term of the next president is not only possible, but is what we should strive to achieve.

Exploiting three earthquakes in Italy as quasi-experiments, we analyse the response of homeowners’ consumption to transfers targeted to finance housing repair and reconstruction. To the extent that funds are made available up-front, these transfers are akin to loans, mainly affecting the liquidity of households’ wealth

Inequality, racism, and violence are the real killers in America.

America’s economic system has failed by not raising living standards for most.

There is a renewed interest in the size of labour supply elasticities and the discrepancy between micro and macro estimates. Recent contributions have stressed the distinction between changes in labour supply at the extensive and the intensive margin. In this paper, we stress the importance of individual heterogeneity and aggregation problems.