The History Of Income Inequality And Popping Economic Bubbles
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Source: AP Photo/Elise Amendola
In a significant study by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, they explain the economic impact historically on capital and upper income Americans:
We find that top capital incomes were severely hit by major shocks in the first part of the century. The post-World War I depression and the Great Depression destroyed many businesses and thus significantly reduced top capital incomes. The wars generated large fiscal shocks, especially in the corporate sector that mechanically reduced distributions to stockholders. We argue that top capital incomes were never able to fully recover from these shocks, probably because of the dynamic effects of progressive taxation on capital accumulation and wealth inequality. We also show that top wage shares were flat from the 1920s until 1940 and dropped precipitously during the war. Top wage shares have started to recov
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When Parag Waknis lived in the United States, he would give friends and colleagues the same gift every year: a voucher. Often derided for their lack of originality and thoughtfulness, these much-maligned rectangles of plastic are some economists’ perfect gift: something that technically fulfills the criteria of a present while also giving the recipient the freedom to choose their own gift. “I was completely convinced that cash was the way to go,” Waknis says.
After moving to India in 2018 to become an associate professor of economics at Ambedkar University Delhi, Waknis found himself under pressure to give gifts that show how well he knows the recipient. His carefree days of doling out gift cards no matter the occasion are increasingly a thing of the past. Yet Waknis can’t shake the thought that there is a glaring economic flaw with gift giving. Sometimes, recipients just don’t like what they get.
Orazio Attanasio, Peter Levell, Hamish Low, Virginia Sánchez Marcos
In spite of the substantial decline in gender differences in labour market outcomes observed over the last few decades in developed countries, substantial gender gaps remain. As discussed in Blau and Kahn (2017), gender gaps in terms of conventional human capital variables are now small, particularly among highly educated individuals. However, a gender pay gap persists, and is more pronounced at the top of the wage distribution.
The dynamics of the gender wage gap during the early career
Empirical evidence of a widening overall gender gap after several years in the labour market has been found in the UK (Manning and Swafield 2008) and the US (Goldin 2014, Erosa et al. 2016). Interestingly, similar findings are reported among a more homogenous sub-sample of the population, such as university graduates, MBAs from top business schools, or associate lawyers (Goldin 2014, Goldin et al. 2017, Azmat and Ferrer 2017). Be
Opinion: The risks and rewards of Christmas gift-giving theglobeandmail.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theglobeandmail.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Nathan Nunn, Nancy Qian
Scholars have thought about population density and how it affects economic outcomes for far longer than there have been economists. Writing around the year 200, the Christian church father Tertullian complained that there were so many people that “we are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate to us; and our needs straiten us and complaints are everywhere while already nature does not sustain us.” The negative effect of a mismatch between population and the availability of land was at the centre of Malthus’ analysis. More recently, the one child policy in China resulted from a fear that growing population would soon outstrip the country’s natural resources, and similar fears motivated less draconian policies in India and several other countries. The issue even plays a central role in the 2018 film “Avengers: Infinity War,” in which the chief bad guy, Thanos, pursues a plan to kill half of the population in order to stave off t