Income and Wealth

The New Latino Underclass: Immigration Enforcement as a Race-Making Institution

Latinos have now surpassed African Americans as the nation’s largest minority group. Although Latinos have been in the country in significant numbers since the 1848 annexation of Northern Mexico, the Latino population has grown rapidly in recent decades as a result of immigration from Mexico and Central America, constituting 16.3% of the population in 2010.

The Great Recession and the Social Safety Net

The social safety net responded in significant and favorable ways during the Great Recession. Aggregate per capita expenditures grew significantly, with particularly strong growth in the SNAP, EITC, UI, and Medicaid programs. Distributionally, the increase in transfers was widely shared across demographic groups, including families with and without children, single-parent and two-parent families. Transfers grew as well among families with more employed members and with fewer employed members.

Tackling the Managerial Power Problem: The Key to Improving Executive Compensation

Lucian A. Bebchuk and Jesse M. Fried argue that executive pay exceeds its fair market level and that stockholders can rein it in only if their power is increased.

Recession Depression: Mental Health Effects of the 2008 Stock Market Crash

How do sudden, large wealth losses affect mental health? Most prior studies of the causal effects of material well-being on health use identification strategies involving income increases; these studies as well as prior research on stock market accumulations may not inform this question if the effect of wealth on health is asymmetric. We use exogenous variation in the interview dates of the 2008 Health and Retirement Study to assess the impact of large wealth losses on mental health among older U.S. adults.

Public Attitudes About Macroeconomic Policy in the U.S.

Since at least the Great Depression, most economists and most Americans appear to have accepted that the government should play a significant role in managing the economy by adopting policies that stabilize employment, encourage economic growth, and control inflation. Nevertheless, Americans have always differed on the proper form and extent of government intervention, and these differences may have sharpened in recent decades. In general, policy attitudes appear to have sorted into liberal and conservative clusters and aligned more fully with partisan preferences (Abramowitz 2010).

Measures of Income Segregation

In this paper I propose a class of measures of rank-order segregation, each of which may be used to measure segregation by a continuous (but not necessarily interval-scaled) variable, such as income. These rank-order segregation indices have several appealing features that remedy flaws in existing measures of income segregation. First, the measures are insensitive to rank-preserving changes in the income distribution.

Income, Wealth and Debt and the Great Recession

The Great Depression is often cast as the beginning of the end for the late Gilded Age. Because it brought on the institutional reforms of the New Deal, it led to dramatic reductions in income inequality and set the stage for a long period of comparatively low inequality. The purpose of this recession brief is to ask whether the Great Recession, like the Great Depression, is likewise shaping up as a compressive event that will reverse some of the run-up in inequality of the so-called New Gilded Age.

How Has the Financial Crisis Affected the Finances of Older Households?

This brief considers the impact of recent declines in stock prices and nominal interest rates on older households, examining the effect of the crisis on the financial wealth of older households, the impact of the financial crisis on the investment and total incomes of retired households, and the impact of the financial crisis on lifetime consumption.

What's Right, What's Wrong, and What's Fixable: A Dispassionate Look at Executive Compensation

Alex Edmans and Xavier Gabaix suggest that increasing executive pay mainly reflects the real value of executives. But they also advocate for reforms that would induce executives to attend more to long-term profits and value.

Executive Compensation: What Should We Do? PowerPoint by Robert Frank

Robert Frank's PowerPoint presentation to accompany his talk at the Executive Compensation event sponsored by the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality and hosted at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC on May 4, 2010. See also the PowerPoint audio file of this talk.

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