Inequality & Distribution

The conference aims to examine the complex interplay of housing, law, economics, and spatial justice in an unequal world, and we welcome scholars and practitioners to participate.

As the world grapples with rapid technological advancements, demographic shifts, environmental challenges, and governance transformations, new forms of inequality are emerging.

Author and Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Democracy Collaborative, Marjorie Kelly, talks about her recently released book, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises (Berrett-Kohler, September 2023), which also outlines a vision for democratizing the economy so that it serves the broader public good.

Connecticut is the first state to fund and enact a baby bonds program, inspiring more states to create their own plans. Can it make a difference?

White House contenders ignore root causes threatening the program, potentially worsened by cuts. Is it due to reliance on wealthy donors?

When working within the same employment spell, female workers, particularly those of color and those working in low-wage service and care jobs, earn significantly less when facing greater volatility than their male counterparts or those working in non-service, non-care occupations.

Alessandro Roncaglia has mulled the topic of power over his long and distinguished career – a topic most economists avoid. His new book explores the historical dynamics of power and asks how we can change its distribution today.

Research on labor market experience does not explain the link between the volatility low-wage workers encounter and their earnings and it leaves open numerous pressing questions, such as what, if anything, can be done to reduce racial and ethnic differences in economic well-being.

Which households are more exposed to financial risk and to what extent is their debt systemically relevant?

Examining the crucial role of poverty and inequality in shaping household indebtedness.

In accepting mass unemployment, post-communist governments and the democratic parties that constituted them removed the economic foundation for Poland’s democracy.

A new book by economist Richard McGahey examines the country’s anti-urban structure and ideology, offering insights on how American cities can thrive.

Oxfam’s Economic Justice Director, Nabil Ahmed, and Oxfam International’s Inequality Policy & Advocacy Lead, Max Lawson, discuss their latest Global Inequality Report, which highlights the accelerating pace at which the world’s billionaires have increased their wealth exponentially in recent years. They also discuss the ways in which governments can reverse this trend through taxation.

How can we quantify the wage share implied by varying degrees and types of participation to Global Value Chains?

If primary commodities and mid-to-high-tech manufacturing products are produced by industries with different wage shares, there are distributive implications of deepening trade integration with certain regions with respect to others.

Cryptocurrency was supposed to change the economic outlook for Black America. For many, it made things worse.

In her new book, veteran Wall Street watcher and economist Nomi Prins warns that central bank strategies deployed since the financial crisis are destroying the real economy, worsening inequality, and creating societal chaos.

Antitrust expert Hal Singer shows how big businesses in certain industries are taking advantage of inflation worries to jack up prices far beyond their cost increases, all the while raking in robber-baron profits.

The 5th UNCTAD YSI Summer School provides an opportunity to explore the Challenges and Opportunities of a New International Economic Order. The school will bring together UNCTAD experts, academics, diplomats, and young scholars from across the globe for lively and stimulating intellectual debates.

World-renowned economist and inequality researcher Thomas Piketty in conversation with Rob Johnson, about Piketty’s just-released book, A Brief History of Equality.

Can society continue its long-run trajectory and commit to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can advance equality?

Peter Barnes, the entrepreneur and author of the recently published book, Ours: The Case for Universal Property, talks about how new conceptions of property - a universal commons - could fundamentally transform capitalism to make it more ecologically and socially sustainable.

The tradition of abandoning our elderly populations needs to end. Sarita Mohanty talks with Rob Johnson about her work at the SCAN Foundation, and the critical importance of combating “ageism” to strengthening our society. Learn more: https://www.thescanfoundation.org/

The social cost of America’s economic royalty

Anand Giridharadas, writer and author of the book, Winners Take All, discusses the multiple crises we are currently facing, how they could provide an impetus for real change, and how US and global elites are failing to live up to the challenge.

Max Lawson, head of Oxfam International’s Inequality Policy program, discusses Oxfam’s latest inequality report, “Inequality Kills,” which highlights the extreme growth in wealth of the billionaire class during the pandemic and how this has had a direct effect on the health and survival of the world’s bottom 50%.

EEO-1 employment data document the vast over-representation of Asian Americans and vast under-representation of African Americans at tech companies in recent years. How did this happen?

EEO-1 employment data document the vast over-representation of Asian Americans and vast under-representation of African Americans at tech companies in recent years. How did this happen?

In a society where asset ownership is incredibly unequal, social mobility becomes severely diminished

In a society where asset ownership is incredibly unequal, social mobility become severely diminished

What does Biden’s economic policy mean for the future?

Lori Wallach, of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, and Jayati Ghosh, economics professor at UMass Amherst, discuss how first world countries are protecting pharma companies’ exorbitant profits, at the expense of vaccinating people living in the Global South and thereby also endangering everyone in the world.

The governance of technology is a new challenge. The Recovery Plans is encouraging the digital transformation of our economies. An acceleration of technological change is bound to deeply affect labor markets and income distribution. While labor-market adaptation is likely to stave off permanent high unemployment, it cannot be counted on to prevent a sharp rise in inequality.

The world won’t emerge from the pandemic until the pandemic is controlled everywhere, and this is a special concern because of the new mutations that are likely to arise where the disease is running its course. So too, the world won’t have a robust economic recovery until at least most of the world is on the course to prosperity. Global growth is far more muted now than then, and inward-looking policies in some of the nations where growth has been restored have resulted in an increase in their trade surplus, attenuating the global impact of their recovery.

Our world is full of fault lines—growing inequality in income and opportunity; systemic racism; health and economic crises from a global pandemic; mistrust of experts; the existential threat of climate change; deep threats to employment in a digital economy with robotics on the rise. These fundamental problems and others like them stem from a common crisis in values.

Watch INET at the Trento Economics Festival online

The plight of white blue-collar workers is well-known, but Blacks in that category were feeling the squeeze long before their white counterparts.

How once-promising Black upward mobility reversed course, and what can be done about it

The economy is likely to be crippled for months and fiscal rescue on a large scale, once again, is very much necessary.

Traditional welfare systems have emphasized the need for redistribution post-production. Are these policies sufficient in the future?

Warnings of “corruption and incompetence coming together,” as economists William Lazonick and Öner Tulum study the race to end the pandemic.

What are the 100 most pertinent economic questions facing our global societ?

Human societies have always coevolved with technology, but how can we think of technology? Is it an external force outside our control, or do we have a say in its direction, development and deployment?

Racial inequalities of wealth and income are pervasive. This episode of Debt Talks will feature a conversation with four prominent experts on the persistence of racial inequalities of wealth and income and the role of financial markets in shaping them.

Mainstream economics ignores historical and structural factors by design

Over and over again, US government policies designed to transfer and create wealth and economic opportunity were restricted to whites by design.

Do the benefits of new technologies accrue primarily to inventors, early investors, and highly skilled users, or to society more widely as their adoption generates employment growth?

Rising inequality has focused attention on the benefits of new technologies. Do these accrue primarily to inventors, early investors, and highly skilled users, or to society more widely as their adoption generates employment growth?

What counts as work and what doesn’t?

A look at the American household debt boom

Increased borrowing by middle-class families with low income growth played a central role in rising indebtedness

IMPORTANT: Due to growing concerns around the coronavirus, the INET Conference, as well as these workshops will be postponed. Applicants will soon be provided further information.

Trevon Logan discusses the impact of structural racism in health and economics

Inequality, in many ways, may be the biggest question of our times. And yet it is a topic that is still underexplored in conventional economics curricula.

Reconstituting capitalism and revitalizing the liberal international order will require revisiting first principles of Western political economy, rebalancing the emphasis it places on broad living standards as opposed to national income. The 2020 US presidential campaign has begun to do just that.

The University of Chicago’s Raghuram Rajan explains how inequalities in the education system lock in a hereditary hierarchy of success

A meeting hosted by INET’s Commission on Global Economic Transformation (CGET) and Oxfam Strategic Dialogue at the WEF Africa meeting

Artificial intelligence promises to make our lives easier. But is the cost losing some of our humanity?

Economist Marie Mora discusses the deep economic crisis that has afflicted Puerto Rico for years

When the stock market grows faster than the housing market, the gains of the top 1% outpace those of the middle class

There is not one opioid crisis in America—there are many. And supply-focused measures won’t stop them.

Shaped by the 2008 financial crisis, a new generation of economists is expanding the boundaries of economic thinking on credit cycles, private debt, and financial stability.

How free electricity could fight climate change and inequality

Returns on wealth exceed growth for more countries, more years, and more dramatically than Piketty has found

A collection of our research on populism, globalization and nationalism

Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to be a job killer—if we use it right

The implications of rising inequality are massive. Economists need to tackle it together.

Lance Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research, delivers the annual Heilbroner Memorial Lecture on the Future of Capitalism.

The Nobel laureate economist discusses how an activist government is needed to tackle problems like climate change

Decades before it caught on with other economists, Sadie Alexander was the first economist to recommend a government jobs guarantee in the US

Pharmaceutical pushers like Purdue “couldn’t have done their dirty work” without America’s increasingly unbalanced economy

Economic distress in rural areas and opioid exposure in cities are key indicators of overdose deaths

For years, governments in India and much of the developing world have followed the advice of a paper arguing that labor regulations actually hurt workers. The problem? The research was wrong.

For years, governments in India and much of the developing world have followed the advice of a paper arguing that labor regulations actually hurt workers. The problem? The research was wrong.

Journalist Andrea Gabor’s new book heralds a “quiet revolution” in education you didn’t know was happening

Thomas Piketty and his colleagues have insisted that tax records are better for measuring inequality than income surveys. They’re wrong.

Starting with the literature on the estimates of the natural rate of interest, this paper critically analyzes the modern practice of identifying the benchmark rate of monetary policy with an equilibrium or neutral interest rate reflecting “fundamental forces” unaffected by monetary factors.

Chaired by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence, INET has assembled a global team of leaders and scholars calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

When central banks set inflation targets, they effectively redistribute income from wage earners to bondholders

The Private Debt initiative is an opportunity to articulate how private debt impacts the economy and to specify the pathways for its effects. The initiative will also lead to better knowledge for the use of regulators, policymakers, journalists, and the public. Finally, the Private Debt initiative will open a better-informed dialogue towards tangible solutions to the problems posed by excessive private debt.

Thomas Piketty and his colleagues have insisted that tax records are better for measuring inequality than income surveys. They’re wrong.

The American economy changed rapidly in the last half-century. The National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) were designed before these changes started. They have stretched to accommodate new and growing service activities, but they are still organized for an industrial economy.

America’s new “philanthrocapitalists” are enabling social problems rather than solving them

Until 2008, rising home values gave the middle class a cushion amid growing income inequality. But following the financial crisis, that wealth has failed to return.

The Rise of China and the Future of WorkArtificial intelligence could replace routine jobs but allow us to “pursue dreams”

Donald Trump, democracy, and how the wealthy crush the American Dream

The YSI Economics of Innovation, Economic Development and Africa Working Groups, in partnership with Global Network for Economics of Learning, Innovation and Competence Building Systems (GLOBELICS), Globelics Alumni, are organizing the 1st GLOBELICS Pre-Conference for Young Scholars entitled ‘Financing of Innovation and Infrastructure for Development’.

William Lazonick has shown how the doctrine of “shareholder value” has hurt wages in the United States. But in Latin America, where family corporations dominate, the story is more complicated.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to replace routine jobs, says Dr. Kai-Fu Lee. But done right, that process could allow us to “pursue dreams, spend time with our loved ones and find out why we exist as humans”

Economists who dismiss inequality as a problem secondary to poverty miss the point: Inequality is part of what drives poverty

“We don’t look after each other at all,” says Jeffrey Sachs on America today

This paper examines the relationship between placement of publications in Top Five (T5) journals and receipt of tenure in academic economics departments.

Getting published in a top five economics journal is a near-requirement for tenure. But it’s a poor measure of research quality within a system that punishes creativity.

The Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) is supporting the conference “Hello, Can You Hear Me? Added Value and Inequalities in a Global Market,” that will be held at La Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), on September 20th and 21st. The event is promoted by CEST and funded by the Young Scholars Initiative – INET and by the “Luigi Einaudi” Research Centre.

In Europe and the United States, stock-based compensation discourages long-term corporate sustainability

This paper adds to the empirical evidence on the extent to which stock-based pay incentivizes and rewards European corporate executives. It shows that the actual realized gains (that is, take-home compensation) from stock-based pay of CEOs in European publicly-listed firms may be underestimated by the use of “estimated fair value” measures. The paper also documents the heterogeneity among countries in terms of the levels and components of CEO take-home pay. We base our work on a sample of 301 large, publicly-traded companies listed in the S&P Europe 350 index from 11 EU countries: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom for the fiscal year 2015. Through analyzing companies’ annual reports, we have hand-collected data on various elements of compensation of the company’s CEO in 2015, including the gains that executives realize from stock-based pay. We document that on average half of the total compensation of the European CEOs in our sample is stock-based, measured by actual realized gains, with large differences among countries. Although in some European countries the majority of total compensation is stock-based, the proportions are still well below those that prevail in the

When a small group of companies can dominate a labor market, wages—and workers—suffer

Winnie Byanyima shows how we all suffer when corporations evade taxes

To understand labor productivity—and growing inequality—you have to look at the “dual economy”