Income Inequality

How to Even Out the Pains and Gains from International Trade

The idea of creating transfer schemes to compensate the losers from international trade yet still preserve some of the gains faces a myriad of...

When Social Policy Saves Lives: Analyzing Trends in Mortality Inequality in the United States and France

Understanding how inequalities in health and inequalities in income are connected is key for policymaking. New research analyzing mortality trends in the United States...

How US Voters React to Immigration in the Voting Booth May Depend on Both Immigrants’ and Native Residents’ Skill Levels

A new working paper has revealed two strikingly divergent correlations between increases in high-skilled and low-skilled immigration and change in Republican vote share since...

Gabriel Zucman: “Some People in Economics Feel That Talking About Inequality Is Not What Economists Should Be Doing"

The rising scholar of taxation and inequality talks to ProMarket about the problems excessive economic power poses for open political systems, how states can...

Education Quality Has Less to Do with Adult Outcomes Than You Might Think

A new paper assesses the contributions of education and labor markets to differences across regional labor markets in the United States and finds that differences in access to...

Excessive Zoning Makes Us Poorer and More Unequal

We normally think of income inequality as a function of differences in class or socioeconomic status. But much more than generally realized, geographic differences...

Why Democracy Fails to Reduce Inequality: Blame the Brahmin Left

A new paper by Thomas Piketty finds that major parties on both sides of the political spectrum have been captured by elites and warns...

Baldwin on Globalization: “A Lot of the Narrative Is Based on the US as If It Were the Whole World”

Richard Baldwin, professor of international trade at the Graduate Institute of Geneva and editor-in-chief of VoxEU.org, talks to ProMarket about the convergence between the...

“Globalization Has Contributed to Tearing Societies Apart”

In an interview with ProMarket, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik explained where globalization went wrong, how trade agreements serve rent-seeking by politically well-connected firms, and...

Investing in Quality Early Childcare Is Good for Vulnerable Kids—and Good Economics, Too


Early childcare can be a major contributor to eliminating inequality of opportunity and even lay the foundations for a more productive workforce in the...

Latest news

Creation over Time in Copyright and Patent

On May 18, the United States Supreme Court decided two intellectual property cases with two seemingly different results. A closer look, however, reveals a complimentary concern with the monopolistic power of first movers and how the legal system should enable innovation from second movers over time, writes Randy Picker.

ESG Standards’ Good, Bad and Ugly

The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted a virtual event discussing the standards, metrics and disclosures of investments focused on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals. The following is a transcript of the event.

Reregulate.

Lee Hepner and William J. McGee respond to Clifford Winston’s ProMarket piece asserting that further deregulation of the airline industry would resolve problems in the industry. Instead, the authors claim a return to regulation would produce better results for travelers.

A World With Far Fewer Mergers

Brooke Fox and Walter Frick analyze research and ideas presented at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference that question the value of mergers.

The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.

The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...

Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market

While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.