Measurement

We estimate long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for representative samples of the U.S. - born population. Harmonizing all surveys that include father's occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s-1970s birth cohorts. We show that mobility increases between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts and that the decline of Black-white income gaps explains about half of this rise. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly women, considerable overstates the level of mobility for twentieth-century birth cohorts while simultaneously understating its increase between the 1910s and 1940s.

In this project we study ethnic discrimination by states as an organizational problem. To do so, we have collaborated with Peru's anti-corruption agency to accurately characterize differential treatment of public officials.

Are slums stepping-stones to better lives or poverty traps? To do so, we will leverage unique administrative data from Brazil alongside an intergenerational quantitative urban model which integrates human capital investment decisions and thus social mobility.

We quantify precisely the wealth redistribution generated by the current inflation shock in the US and we look at macroeconomic models with heterogenous agents (HANK) which typically feature households immediately adjusting to macroeconomic shocks (e.g. a rise in interest rates).

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.

This paper introduces a novel lens through which we can view and understand the world, which is compositional inequality. Compositional inequality describes differences between rich and poor in terms of the labour share and capital share of their income.

This paper investigates how individuals weight income gaps between themselves and others in particular positions in a societal income distribution. This is crucial to understand how individuals form their fairness considerations and preferences for redistribution, as we know that people care about inequality both in absolute and in relative terms.

This paper examines how tax incentives lower effective tax rates and how they vary with firm size. This is important because tax incentives generate a government revenue loss, can distort firms’ production, and may exacerbate inequality. We also use our estimates of effective tax rates to assess the potential impact of a Global Minimum Tax.

This paper develops algorithms that recover existing national accounts aggregates from naturally occurring transaction data and produce novel measures, such as distributional national accounts for the different components of output.

A determinant of aggregate productivity differences, both across countries and within countries over time, is how well resources such as capital and labour are allocated across firms. The importance of such resource misallocation for aggregate productivity is often inferred from the dispersion in average revenue products (revenues over inputs) in firm-level data. This paper proposes a methodology to correct estimates of misallocation for measurement error in revenue and inputs.

How rich are the richest Americans? A thorough answer to this question is necessary to address public concern over rising inequality, whether the distribution of resources is fair, and how policy ought to respond. This paper uses administrative tax data to estimate top wealth in the United States.

The use of machine learning in credit allocation should allow lenders to better extend credit, but the shift from traditional to machine learning lending models may have important distributional effects for consumers. This paper analyzes the effect of machine learning on mortgage lending in the US.

By providing confidence sets for ranks, this paper addresses the problem that rankings, for example, of neighborhoods in the US according to intergenerational mobility can be more or less informative.

This research uses lab experiments to find out whether common values, including equality, enhance cohesion in a society.

A glitch with the standard algorithm stimulated a broader question: Is there an inequality measure that both captures how people experience economic disparities and independently of the number of wealth holders, is not downward-biased?

This paper explores cases in which people are connected via social and economic networks and how these affect the equilibrium degree of inequality among the network participants.

To address the question of the role of technology and institutions in the emergence of persistent wealth inequality in human societies, this study uses 9,000 years of archaeological records.