The Unassuming Economist

Below is a preliminary list of papers that were presented at this year’s AEA Annual Meeting on January 4-6 in Atlanta, Georgia.

On income inequality

• Time Discounting, Savings Behavior and Wealth Inequality – Paper
• Wealth Inequality, Income Volatility, and Race – Paper
• Are Financial Information Technologies Making the Rich Richer? – Paper
• The Uncertainty of Academic Rent and Income Inequality: The OECD Panel Evidence – Paper
• Does Environmental Policy Affect Income Inequality? Evidence from The Clean Air Act. – Paper and Presentation
• Examining Interrelation between Global and National Income Inequalities – Paper and Presentation
• Top 1% Income Shares: Comparing Estimates Using Tax Data – Paper
• Modeling Wealth and Income Inequality: Implications for Optimal Taxation – AEA
• Openness and Income Disparity in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Cross-Country Analysis – AEA
• Military Expenditures and Income Inequality Evidence from a Panel of European Countries (1990-2015) – AEA

On wage and employment inequality

• Global Value Chains, Firms, and Wage Inequality: Evidence from China – Paper
• The Effects of Credit Supply on Wage Inequality between and within Firms – Paper
• College Tuition and Income Inequality – Paper
• The Innovation Premium to Soft Skills in low-skilled occupations – Paper
• Employment Inequality: Why Do the Low-Skilled Work Less Now? – Paper and Presentation
• Skill, Agglomeration, and Inequality in the Spatial Economy – Paper
• Closing the Gap: The Effect of a Targeted, Tuition-Free Promise on College Choices of High-Achieving, Low-Income Students – Paper 
• Work and Grow Rich: The Dynamic Effects of Performance Pay Contracts – Paper
• Between Firm Changes in Earnings Inequality: The Role of Productivity Dispersion, the Composition of Firms and Workers, and Industry Earnings Differentials – AEA
• Is Employment Polarization Informative About Wage Inequality and Is Employment Really Polarizing? – AEA
• Income, Poverty, and Inequality over Two Decades – AEA
• Tasks, Occupations, and Wage Inequality in an Open Economy – AEA

On gender inequality

• Coordination of Hours within the Firm – Paper and Presentation
• The Role of Historical Resource Scarcity in Modern Gender Inequality – Presentation
• Gender Inequality and Economic Growth: Evidence from Industry-Level Data – Paper
• Managers’ Gender Norms and the Gender Gap – Paper
• Gender Earnings Inequality and Wage Policy in Kyrgyzstan: Evidence from Household Surveys, 2010-2016 – Paper
• Gender Inequality and Marketisation Hypothesis in sub-Saharan Africa – Paper
• Fiscal Policy Effectiveness on Gender Equality in Asia Pacific: Efficacy of Gender Budgeting – Paper and Presentation
• Fields of Study Choices and the Reproduction of Gender Inequalities – AEA
• The Global Cost of Gender Inequality – AEA
• Sexual Dimorphism in Stature as a Measure of Gender Inequality – AEA
• The Origins and Real Effects of the Gender Gap: Evidence from CEOs’ Formative Years – AEA

On inequality and everything else

• Land Inequality and the Provision of Public Works – Paper
• Consumption Inequality across Heterogeneous Families – Paper
• Coupled Lotteries – A New Method to Analyze Inequality Aversion – Paper
• Biased Perceptions? Consolidating Cross-Country Evidence on Objective and Perceived Inequality – Paper
• Investment-Specific Technological Change, Taxation and Inequality in the U.S. – Paper and Presentation
• The Effect of Political Power on Labor Market Inequality: Evidence from the 1965 Voting Rights Act – Paper
• Regional Inequality in the U.S.: Evidence from City-level Purchasing Power – Paper
• Inequality, Autocracy and Sovereign Funds as Determinants of Foreign Portfolio Flows – Paper and Presentation
• Does the Girl Next Door Affect Your Academic Outcomes and Career Choices? – Paper     
• Beyond Piketty: A New Perspective on Poverty and Inequality in India – AEA
• Is India’s Employment Guarantee Program Successfully Challenging Her Historical Inequalities? – AEA
• Regional Differences in the Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality: Evidence from the NLSY – AEA
• Globalization and Inequality in Innovation: A Perspective from U.S. R&D Tax Credit Policy – AEA
• Information and Inequality – AEA
• Redistribution through Markets – AEA
• Estimating Inequality in Air Pollution Exposure  – AEA
• Are There Macroeconomic Costs to Racial Inequality in the United States? – AEA
• Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality – AEA
• Spatial Justice, Uneven Development, and Intergenerational Inequality: A ‘Postcolonial’ United States of America – AEA

From Finance & Development:

“Al Capone had a problem: he needed a way to disguise the enormous amounts of cash generated by his criminal empire as legitimate income. His solution was to buy all-cash laundromats, mix dirty money in with clean, and then claim that washing ordinary Americans’ shirts and socks, rather than gambling and bootlegging, was the source of his riches.

Almost a century later, the basic concept of money laundering is the same, but its scale and complexity have grown considerably. Were Capone alive today, he would have to run his washers and dryers around the clock to keep pace with demand; the United Nations recently estimated that the criminal proceeds laundered annually amount to between 2 and 5 percent of global GDP, or $1.6 to $4 trillion a year.

Threat to stability

Money laundering is what enables criminals to reap the benefits of their crimes, including corruption, tax evasion, theft, drug trafficking, and migrant smuggling. Many of these crimes pose a direct threat to economic stability. Corruption and tax evasion make it difficult for governments to deliver sustainable and inclusive growth by diminishing the resources available for productive purposes, such as building roads, schools, and hospitals. Criminal activity undermines state authority and the rule of law while squeezing out legitimate economic activity. And money laundering may create asset bubbles in markets like real estate, a common vehicle.

A recent example illustrates the point. A Guinean minister helped a foreign company obtain important mining concessions in exchange for $8.5 million in bribes. Falsely reporting that money as income from consulting work and private land sales, the minister transferred it to the United States and bought a luxury estate in New York. But his effort to turn ill-gotten gains into a seemingly legitimate asset was ultimately unsuccessful; last year, he was convicted of money laundering.

In some ways, expensive homes are the modern mobster’s collection of laundromats. A public advisory issued by US authorities last year indicated that over 30 percent of high-value, all-cash real estate purchases in New York City and several other major metropolitan areas were conducted by individuals already suspected of involvement in questionable dealings. The governments of Australia, Austria, Canada, and other countries have concluded that their own real estate markets could also be used to invest and launder dirty money.

Terrorism financing

More worrying still, dirty money—along with clean—may be a source of funding for terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Terrorist groups need money, lots of it, to compensate fighters and their families; buy weapons, food, and fuel; and bribe crooked officials. Similarly, proliferation does not come cheap. For example, North Korea has reportedly devoted a substantial portion of its scarce resources to developing nuclear weapons.”

Continue reading here.

 

Rhoda Weeks-Brown

From a new paper on the service exports in Europe:

“In this paper, we consider the changes that occurred in the service exports of thirty-eight European countries in the period of 2005–2016. We have found that the existing world trend related to the growth of service exports is also present in Europe. However, the trend of the service exports’ share growth in the general volume of export is not common for all European countries. We found that higher growth rates are observed in European countries with lower levels of GDP per capita. We also discovered the presence of a strong positive correlation between growth in service exports and GDP growth, as well as between growth in service exports and GDP per capita. We also found that there is a linear correlation between the growth of service exports and the growth of GDP per capita, as well as between the growth in service exports and GDP growth. The data obtained allowed us to conclude that European countries, categorized as “Innovation Leaders” in accordance with the European Innovation Scoreboard, are not the leading countries in Europe with regard to the rates of service export growth. We also discovered that service exports in Europe are less sensitive to adverse macroeconomic effects than goods exports.”

From a new paper by Sabina Dewan

“As technological advancements proceed at an unprecedented scale and speed upending traditional employment models, researchers across the globe are working frenetically to understand how the world of work is changing and what the future holds. This paper explores the most important questions that scholars, policymakers and practitioners are grappling with in understanding the nexus of technology and jobs. It outlines what we know and where gaps remain. Understanding the potential reach of technological change along with emerging preferences and modes of organization can help us balance priorities across a broad range of actors. There is a need for urgent action to direct the impact that technology has on jobs. This means deliberate choices about work design on the part of employers, exploring new and innovative ways of organizing workers and creating a new set of government policies and regulations to manage the proliferation and effect of technology on jobs.”

From a new Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper:

“Recently, in an important paper, Ball et al. (2017) investigated the Okun relationship for the US and 20 other advanced economies. Focusing on the fit of the relationship between the unemployment rate and output (using both the gap and difference form of Okun’s Law) they find for US data over the sample period 1948-2013 that Okun’s law is a strong, reliable and stable relationship and that a constant (not time-varying) Okun coefficient is a good approximation to reality. They also noted that the Okun coefficient appears to be larger during recessions than during expansions. How can we reconcile empirical evidence that Okun’s coefficient is stable over time, while being asymmetric over the business cycle?

Our paper proposes another look at the relationship between changes in the unemployment rate and output growth through the lens of labor market flows. As far as we know, no one has utilized flows data in this context. Yet clearly the change in the unemployment rate reflects the balance of flows into and out of unemployment within a period and thus it is natural to look at the Okun relationship as a relationship between output growth and labor market flows.”