The Unassuming Economist

They say economists rarely agree on one thing.

However, now this statement may not hold true as before. Based on a survey of members of the American Economic Association, a paper by Doris Geide-Stevenson and Alvaro La Parra Perez of the Weber State University compares the academic positions of economists over four decades.

“The main result is an increased consensus on many economic propositions, specifically the appropriate role of fiscal policy in macroeconomics and issues surrounding income distribution. Economists now embrace the role of fiscal policy in a way not obvious in previous surveys and are largely supportive of government policies that mitigate income inequality. Another area of consensus is concern with climate change and the use of appropriate policy tools to address climate change.”

Click here to download the paper and here to be a part of the discussion on it.

In a column for the public policy think tank, American Enterprise Institute, the top ten inbound and top ten outbound US states for the year 2021 have been compared using new data on net domestic migration data from the US Census Bureau.

Click here to read the full report.

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.

In a column for VoxEU CEPR, Majed Dodin and Sebastian Findeisen of the University of Manheim, Lukas Henkel of the European Central Bank, Dominik Sachs of the University of St. Gallen, and Paul Schüle of the University of Munich write about social mobility in Germany.

“According to the OECD, social mobility in Germany is lower than in most other developed economies, reigniting a debate on equality of opportunity and shortcomings of the education system. This column discusses how census data can be used to obtain high-quality mobility statistics for Germany. Using the Abitur educational qualification as a measure of opportunity, it suggests that relative mobility has remained constant for recent birth cohorts but points to substantial geographic variation in mobility measures across regions in the country.”

Click here to read the full blog.

The IMF’s major book on policies to achieve inclusive growth was just published. The book is available here. 

This and the book, Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth (Ostry, Loungani, Berg; 2019) together make a compelling case for why inequality matters for efficiency and what policies can foster inclusive growth.