The Unassuming Economist

One of the most visible stylized facts in contemporary inequality research is the association, across national economies, between measures of cross-section income inequality and intergenerational mobility or persistence. Recent publications of the National Bureau of Economic Research by Cholli and Durlauf (2022) and Durlauf et al (2022) seek to understand the relationship between cross-sectional income inequality and persistence of income across generations (the Great Gatsby Curve, named after Jay Gatsby, protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s infamous novel who broke through poverty to become a flamboyant millionaire). Five distinct classes of theories, including models on family investments, skills, social influences, political economy, and aspirations are developed, each providing a behavioral mechanism to explain the relationship. Theoretical models imply nonlinear relationships between parent and child status that are often ignored in practice and offer potentially different interpretations of the evidence of heterogeneity in mobility across locations, groups, and time. They conclude with a vision to combine theory with empirics to understand this phenomenon better.

In conversation with Bill Gale, Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy and senior fellow at the Economic Studies Program, Brookings Institution…

In this episode of Econofact’s podcast, Gill discusses the impact of inequitable racial impacts of government policy. Some notable points include the following:

1. Race-blind policies are typically neither race neutral nor race fair because past injustices cast a shadow on current conditions. The absence of racist animus does not mean a policy is not racist.
2. The mortgage interest deduction which favors homeowners who are disproportionately wealthier and white is discussed as a case in point to explain the difference between equity and equality.
3. He discusses the critical race theory (seemingly race-neutral policies lock in the effects of past racism).

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Source: NBER Working Paper (2022)

Researchers Sergey Chernenko and David S. Scharfstein write about the significant racial disparities in borrowing through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) using data gathered from a large sample of restaurants in Florida and then investigate the causes of these disparities. They find that- “Black-owned restaurants are 25% less likely to receive PPP loans. Restaurant location explains 5 percentage points of this differential. Restaurant characteristics explain an additional 10 percentage points of the gap in PPP borrowing. On average, prior borrowing relationships do not explain disparities. The remaining 10% disparity is driven by a 17% disparity in PPP borrowing from banks, which is partially offset by greater borrowing from nonbanks, largely fintechs. Disparities in PPP borrowing cannot be attributed to lower awareness of PPP loans or lower demand for PPP loans by minority-owned restaurants. Black-owned restaurants are significantly less likely to receive bank PPP loans in counties with more racial bias. In these counties, Black-owned restaurants are more likely to substitute to nonbank PPP loans. This substitution, however, is not strong enough to eliminate racial disparities in PPP borrowing”.

One of the most significant stylized facts in the U.S. economy since the 1970s has been the decline in the share of national income accruing to labor. Many recent studies have sought to explain this trend, with most explanations focusing on structural changes such as deindustrialization, globalization, financialization, rising market concentration, and technological change.

In this paper, the authors argue that these forces primarily operate through a bargaining power channel measured by the cost of job loss and that the reduction in labor’s share of income has been driven by lower bargaining power for workers. They examine various parameters for the US between 1960 and 2016 to test this hypothesis and conclude that structural changes such as globalization (Furceri and Loungani, 2018) and weak economic performance in the US have increased inequality over time.

Click here to read the full paper.

The ongoing Covid-19 crisis, which is likely to exacerbate economic inequality within countries in the West and probably among countries worldwide (Furceri, Loungani, Ostry, Pizzuto, 2021), has reinstated the need for a thorough investigation into the causes and consequences of inequality. In a recent column for VoxEU CEPR, economists Guido Alfani, Victoria Gierok, and Felix Schaff discuss inequality in the context of Germany over the years.

This column reconstructs wealth inequality in Germany over five centuries and demonstrates potential leveling effects of catastrophes with the help of evidence from events like the Black Death and the Thirty Years’ War. They conclude with insights like the fact that inequality falls in the aftermath of epidemics only in the presence of extremely high mortality rates.

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