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The effectiveness of government policies designed to mitigate inequality depends on how firms, workers, and consumers react to those policies. The minimum wage is an example of such a policy, intended to benefit individuals at the bottom of the wage distribution. Our research provides new insights on how consumer preferences may shape the effectiveness of various policies targeting inequality.

Technical change that extends market scale can generate winner-take-all dynamics, with large income growth among top earners. I test this "superstar model" in the entertainer labor market, where the historic rollout of television creates a natural experiment in scale-related technological change. The resulting inequality changes are consistent with superstar theory: the launch of a local TV station skews the entertainer wage distribution sharply to the right, with the biggest impact at the very top of the distribution, while negatively impacting workers below the star level. The findings provide evidence of superstar effects and distinguish such effects from popular alternative models.

We develop Generational Wealth Accounts (GWA): the first set of balance sheets, by generations, to include all human capital, tangible wealth, financial wealth, and transfer wealth, and the uses to which these are put, and employ them to quantify inter-generational transfers and the sustainability of consumption. Consumption plans in the UK public sector worsened over the financial crisis and are unsustainable; private sector plans improved, and are now almost balanced. Increases in private capital transfers to the young offset the effect of increased public debt. House price increases shifted resources from young to old but had little effect on sustainability.

We quantitatively investigate the welfare costs of increasing tax revenues in low-income countries. We consider three tax instruments: consumption, labour income and capital income taxes. The analysis is based on a general equilibrium model featuring heterogeneous agents, incomplete financial markets, and rural and urban areas. We calibrate the model to Ethiopia and decompose the welfare costs into their aggregate and distributional components. We find that changing taxes alter the composition of demand. This, together with limited labour mobility, causes the incidence of higher taxes to fall disproportionately on the rural population, regardless of the instrument. Consumption taxes are the instrument with the largest welfare loss.

My work will highlight how urban markets, such as housing or transport, respond to government investment and evolve with development. Understanding the mechanisms involved will then inform crucial policy questions. Should governments, particularly in developing countries, optimize existing ‘technologies’ serving the urban lower-income masses – such as shared minibuses or informal settlements – or invest in the formal housing or transit infrastructure?

We examine the role of technological change in explaining the large and persistent decline in earnings following job loss. Using detailed skill requirements from the near universe of online vacancies, we estimate technological change by occupation and find that technological change accounts for 45 percent of the decline in earnings after job loss. Technological change lowers earnings after job loss by requiring workers to have new skills to perform newly created jobs in their prior occupation. When workers lack the required skills, they move to occupations where their skills are still employable but are paid a lower wage.

We use detailed data on stock portfolios of Norwegian households to show that stock market wealth increases entrepreneurship activity. Our research design isolates idiosyncratic, quasi-random variation in stock market returns. An increase in stock market wealth increases the propensity to start a firm, with the response concentrated in households with moderate levels of financial wealth, for whom a 20 percent increase in stock wealth increases the likelihood to start a firm by about 20%, and in years when the aggregate stock market return in Norway is high. We develop a method to study the effect of wealth on firm outcomes that corrects for the bias introduced by selection into entrepreneurship. An increase in stock market wealth also has a causal effect on initial firm size and profitability. The pass-through from stock wealth into equity in the new firm is one-for-one, indicating that higher stock market wealth relaxes would-be entrepreneurs' financial constraints.

We study optimal capital income and wealth taxation in an economy that reproduces the importance of private businesses for output and inequality. If entrepreneurs are subject to collateral constraints, they face heterogeneous rates of return, which generate a meaningful distinction between capital income and wealth taxation. We find that taxing capital income is preferable to taxing wealth because the efficiency gains from wealth taxation are swamped by the redistributional benefits of taxing the profits of richer entrepreneurs. Consequently, the gains from taxing wealth are modest. This conclusion is robust to the planner's preference for redistribution and allowing for nonlinear taxes.

We examine intergenerational mobility in the very long run, across generations that are six centuries apart. We exploit a unique dataset containing detailed information at the individual level for all people living in the Italian city of Florence in 1427. These individuals have been associated, using their surnames, with their pseudo-descendants living in Florence in 2011. We find that long-run earnings elasticity is about 0.04; we also find an even stronger role for real wealth inheritance and evidence of persistence in belonging to certain elite occupations. Our results are confirmed when we account for the quality of the pseudo-links and when we address the potential selectivity bias behind the matching process. Finally, we frame our results within the existing evidence and argue that the quasi-immobility of preindustrial society and the existence of multigenerational effects might explain the long-lasting effects of ancestors’ socioeconomic status.

We will investigate how individuals' self-image and self-stereotypes may prevent access to educational opportunities, leading to a perpetuation of income segregation. We will investigate self-stereotypes in the context of a preferential university admission policy in Chile targeted at disadvantaged students (PACE), which recent work has shown to suffer from low take-up.