Income and Wealth Inequality

  • Nicholas Bloom
  • Raj Chetty
  • Emmanuel Saez

Leaders: Nicholas Bloom, Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez

The CPI is home to some of the country’s most influential analyses of the income and wealth distribution. The purpose of the Income and Wealth RG is to monitor the ongoing takeoff in income inequality, to better understand its sources, and to analyze its implications for labor market performance, educational attainment, mobility, and more. The following is a sampling of the CPI’s research projects within this area.

Trends in income and wealth inequality: What are the key trends in U.S. income and wealth inequality? The U.S. increasingly looks to Emmanuel Saez and his research team for the latest data on U.S. economic inequality.

Distributional National Accounts: In an ambitious infrastructural project, Emmanuel Saez and his team are building a “Distributional National Accounts” based on tax returns, a data set that will eliminate the current gap between (a) national accounts data based on economic aggregates and (b) inequality analysis that uses micro-level tax data to examine the distribution of income but is not consistent with national aggregates. This new data set will in turn make it possible to evaluate the extent to which economic growth, which has long been represented as a preferred poverty-reduction approach, is indeed delivering on that objective.

The rise of between-firm inequality: How much of the rise in earnings inequality can be attributed to increasing between-firm dispersion in the average wages they pay? This question can be addressed by constructing a matched employer-employee data set for the United States using administrative records.

Rent and inequality: It is increasingly fashionable to argue that “rent” accounts for much of the takeoff in income inequality. The Current Population Survey can be used to assess whether this claim is on the mark. 

Income And Wealth - CPI Research

Title Author Media
Neighborhood Income Composition by Race and Income, 1990-2009 Sean F. Reardon, Joseph Townsend, Lindsay Fox

Neighborhood Income Composition by Race and Income, 1990-2009

Author: Sean F. Reardon, Joseph Townsend, Lindsay Fox
Publisher:
Date: 07/2015

Residential segregation, by definition, leads to racial and socioeconomic disparities in neighborhood conditions. These disparities may in turn produce inequality in social and economic opportunities and outcomes. Because racial and socioeconomic segregation are not independent of one another, however, any analysis of their causes, patterns, and effects must rest on an understanding of the joint distribution of race/ethnicity and income among neighborhoods. In this paper, we use a new technique to describe the average racial composition and income distributions in the neighborhoods of households of different income levels and race/ethnicity. Using data from the decennial censuses and the American Community Survey, we investigate how patterns of neighborhood context in the United States over the past two decades vary by household race/ethnicity, income, and metropolitan area. We find large and persistent racial differences in neighborhood context, even among households of the same annual income.

Inequality and Market Failure Kim A. Weeden, David B. Grusky

Inequality and Market Failure

Author: Kim A. Weeden, David B. Grusky
Publisher: Sage Publications
Date: 03/2014

We argue that market failure is a major and growing source of income inequality in the United States and in liberal market economies (LMEs) more generally. This market failure takes the form of occupational, educational, managerial, and capital rents that are generated by institutional barriers that restrict the free flow of capital or labor. We suggest that these four forms of rent can partly account for (a) the extreme income inequality at the very top of the LME income distribution as well as (b) the extreme income inequality that is also observed beneath the highest percentiles of the income distribution. The sharp increase in these forms of rent, when coupled with rent destruction at the bottom of the labor market, may well explain much of the takeoff in LME inequality in the past four decades. We conclude by outlining the empirical research agenda and policy prescription implied by a rent-based account.

Theoretical Models of Inequality Transmission Across Multiple Generations Gary Solon

Theoretical Models of Inequality Transmission Across Multiple Generations

Author: Gary Solon
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd.
Date: 03/2014
Why Status Matters for Inequality Cecilia L. Ridgeway

Why Status Matters for Inequality

Author: Cecilia L. Ridgeway
Publisher:
Date: 02/2014

To understand the mechanisms behind social inequality, this address argues that we need to more thoroughly incorporate the effects of status—inequality based on differences in esteem and respect—alongside those based on resources and power. As a micro motive for behavior, status is as significant as money and power. At a macro level, status stabilizes resource and power inequality by transforming it into cultural status beliefs about group differences regarding who is “better” (esteemed and competent). But cultural status beliefs about which groups are “better” constitute group differences as independent dimensions of inequality that generate material advantages due to group membership itself. Acting through micro-level social relations in workplaces, schools, and elsewhere, status beliefs bias evaluations of competence and suitability for authority, bias associational preferences, and evoke resistance to status challenges from low-status group members. These effects accumulate to direct members of higher status groups toward positions of resources and power while holding back lower status group members. Through these processes, status writes group differences such as gender, race, and class-based life style into organizational structures of resources and power, creating durable inequality. Status is thus a central mechanism behind durable patterns of inequality based on social differences.

Social Capital and Inequality: The Significance of Social Connections Karen S. Cook

Social Capital and Inequality: The Significance of Social Connections

Author: Karen S. Cook
Publisher:
Date: 01/2014

The study of social connections and their consequences is central to social psychology and represents a growing field of inquiry in the social sciences more broadly. It is linked to the analysis of social networks and to what is called “social capital,” a term made popular by Robert Putnam. A major dimension of inequality in society is the extent of access to social capital, to connections that matter. Differential access to such resources is one of the most enduring features of social inequality and a key reason for its reproduction across time and space. Networks structure access and access to social capital is linked to variation in important life outcomes, revealing the significance of such factors for the study of inequality and its reproduction. Social capital has been linked to outcomes as diverse as health status, intellectual development, academic performance, employment opportunities, occupational attainment, entrepreneurial success or failure, and even juvenile delinquency, among other things. This chapter reviews some of the relevant theory and research on networks and inequality.

income and wealth - CPI Affiliates

John Van Reenen's picture John Van Reenen Professor of Applied Economics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Scott Eliason's picture Scott Eliason Associate Professor
University of Minnesota
Jonas Pontusson's picture Jonas Pontusson Professor of Comparative Politics
University of Geneva
Scott M. Lynch's picture Scott M. Lynch Professor, Department of Sociology and the Population Research Institute (DUPRI); Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development
Duke University
Jonathan Kelley's picture Jonathan Kelley Director at International Survey Center; Adjunct Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Nevada, Reno
University of Nevada

Pages

Income And Wealth - Other Research

Title Author Media
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 Paul Krugman

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008

Author: Paul Krugman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Date: 12/2008
Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz and Melissa S....

Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists

Author: David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz and Melissa S....
Publisher: Review of Economics and Statistics
Date: 04/2008
Measuring Ancient Inequality Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G...

Measuring Ancient Inequality

Author: Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G...
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Date: 10/2007
Politics and Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean Huber, Evelyne , François Nielsen, Jenny Pribble , John D. Stephens

Politics and Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean

Author: Huber, Evelyne , François Nielsen, Jenny Pribble , John D. Stephens
Publisher: American Sociological Review
Date: 12/2006
The Economic Lives of the Poor Banerjee, Abhijit, Ester Duflo

The Economic Lives of the Poor

Author: Banerjee, Abhijit, Ester Duflo
Publisher: Journal of Economic Perspectives
Date: 10/2006

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