The Unassuming Economist

In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, authors Arpit Gupta of NYU Stern School of Business, and Anup Malani and Bartosz Woda of the University of Chicago Law School write about inequality in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

“We use a large, representative panel data set from India with monthly data on household finances to examine the incidence of economic harms during the COVID pandemic. We observe a sharp spike in poverty, peaking during India’s sharp but short lockdown. However, there was a striking decrease in income inequality outside the lockdown. There was a smaller decrease in consumption inequality, likely due to consumption smoothing. Evidence supports two mechanisms for the decline in income inequality: the capital income of top-quartile earners covaries more with aggregate income, and demand for labor fell more for higher quartiles.”

Click here to read the full paper.