Income and Wealth Inequality
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.
Featured Examples
Income And Wealth - CPI Research
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Income Inequality and Income Segregation | Sean F. Reardon, Kendra Bischoff |
Income Inequality and Income SegregationAuthor: Sean F. Reardon, Kendra BischoffPublisher: Date: 07/2010 Both income inequality and income segregation in the United States grew substantially from 1970 to 2000. Using data from the 100 largest metropolitan areas, we investigate whether and how income inequality affects patterns of income segregation along three dimensions—the spatial concentration of poverty and affluence; race-specific patterns of income segregation; and the geographic scale of income segregation. We find a robust relationship between income inequality and income segregation, an effect that is larger for black families than for white families. In addition, income inequality affects income segregation primarily through its effect on the large-scale spatial concentration of affluence, rather than by affecting the spatial concentration of poverty or by altering small-scale patterns of income segregation. |
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Measuring What Employers Do about Entry Wages over the Business Cycle: A New Approach | Pedro S. Martins, Gary Solon, Jonathan P. Thomas |
Measuring What Employers Do about Entry Wages over the Business Cycle: A New ApproachAuthor: Pedro S. Martins, Gary Solon, Jonathan P. ThomasPublisher: American Economic Association Date: 02/2010 Rigidity in real hiring wages plays a crucial role in some recent macroeconomic models. But are hiring wages really so noncyclical? We propose using employer/employee longitudinal data to track the cyclical variation in the wages paid to workers newly hired into specific entry jobs. Illustrating the methodology with 1982-2008 data from the Portuguese census of employers, we find real entry wages were about 1.8 percent higher when the unemployment rate was 1 percentage point lower. Like most recent evidence on other aspects of wage cyclicality, our results suggest that the cyclical elasticity of wages is similar to that of employment. |
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How Class Works: Objective and Subjective Aspects of Class since the 1970s | Michael Hout |
How Class Works: Objective and Subjective Aspects of Class since the 1970sAuthor: Michael HoutPublisher: Russell Sage Foundation Date: 07/2008 |
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Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? | Shelley J. Correll, Stephen Benard, In Paik |
Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?Author: Shelley J. Correll, Stephen Benard, In PaikPublisher: American Journal of Sociology Date: 03/2007 |
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Social Class and Earnings Inequality | Kim A. Weeden, Young-Mi Kim, Matthew Di Carlo, David B. Grusky |
Social Class and Earnings InequalityAuthor: Kim A. Weeden, Young-Mi Kim, Matthew Di Carlo, David B. GruskyPublisher: American Behavioral Scientist Date: 01/2007 |
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income and wealth - CPI Affiliates
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Mikk Titma |
Senior Research Scholar |
Stanford University |
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Robert Max Jackson |
Professor of Sociology |
New York University |
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Harold R. Kerbo |
Professor of Sociology |
California Polytechnic State University |
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Daron Acemoglu |
Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
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Moshe Semyonov |
Bernard and Audre Rapoport Chair Professor of the Sociology of Labor, Tel Aviv University; Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago |
University of Illinois at Chicago and Tel Aviv University |
Pages
Income And Wealth - Other Research
Title | Author | Media | |
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Social Mobility in Industrial Society | Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix |
Social Mobility in Industrial SocietyAuthor: Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard BendixPublisher: Transaction Publishers Date: |
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Wage and Productivity Dispersion in United States Manufacturing: The Role of Computer Investment | Timothy Dunne, Lucia Foster, John Haltiwanger,... |
Wage and Productivity Dispersion in United States Manufacturing: The Role of Computer InvestmentAuthor: Timothy Dunne, Lucia Foster, John Haltiwanger,...Publisher: Journal of Labor Economics Date: |
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The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification | Randall Collins |
The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and StratificationAuthor: Randall CollinsPublisher: Academic Press Date: |
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The Theory of the Leisure Class | Thorstein Veblen | ||
The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class | Alvin W. Gouldner |
The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New ClassAuthor: Alvin W. GouldnerPublisher: Seabury Press Date: |
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Income And Wealth - Multimedia
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