Wealth inequality

Inequality Has Increased Far Less Than You Think (If You Consider Social Security Benefits)

In the United States, Social Security accounts for nearly 60 percent of the total wealth of the bottom 90 percent. Once Social Security is...

The World After Covid-19: Inequality Within Rich Countries Will Increase, Globalization Will Reverse, Politics Will Remain Turbulent

The negative effects of the crisis on growth will be very strong. But it will not affect everyone in the same way. If the...

The Most Persistent of All Zombie Ideas: That Taxing the Wealthy Is Destructive to the Economy

Economics can’t tell you what values to have. It can, however, shed light on what to expect from policy that reflects any particular set...

What Is the Meaning of Wealth?

Who's richer, a person who enjoys the comfort of modern services and technologies, or the ancient kings of a millennia ago? Comparing wealth over...

Why There Is No “Crisis of Capitalism”

Western dissatisfaction with globalization is wrongly diagnosed as dissatisfaction with capitalism, when in fact it is the product of the uneven distribution of the...

A New Capitalisn't Episode: The Controversial Tax Policies Of Emmanuel Saez

In a new episode of their podcast Capitalisn't, Luigi Zingales and Kate Waldock interview UC Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez on tax policy, the wealth...

Emmanuel Saez: Saying Inequality Has Not Increased in the US "the Equivalent of Being a Climate Change Denier”

In an interview with ProMarket ahead of his upcoming Stigler Center visit this week, UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez discussed the impact of the...

The Betrayal of Populism: Why the New Far Right Is the Real Threat to Our Democracy

Much of the discussion on populism focuses exclusively on protest against the political system: the protest of “the people” against “the elite.” But elites...

Chile's Fall From Grace Shows the Failures of Neoliberalism

For many years, Chile’s economic growth and transition to democracy have made it the poster boy for neoliberalism. The current wave of protests highlights...

“Avoiding Plutocracy Would Require a Political Change”: Branko Milanovic on the Future of Capitalism

In an interview with ProMarket, CUNY Graduate Center economist Branko Milanovic discussed the differences and similarities between US-style and China-style capitalism and explained why,...

LATEST NEWS

Uninhibited Campaign Donations Risks Creating Oligarchy

In new research, Valentino Larcinese and Alberto Parmigiani find that the 1986 Reagan tax cuts led to greater campaign spending from wealthy individuals, who benefited the most from this policy. The authors argue that a very permissive system of political finance, combined with the erosion of tax progressivity, created the conditions for the mutual reinforcement of economic and political disparities. The result was an inequality spiral hardly compatible with democratic ideals.

Did the Meme Stock Revolution Actually Change Anything?

Many financial commentators thought that the surge of retail investors participating in the stock market, the most notable of whom boosted “meme stocks” like GameStop, would democratize corporate governance and improve prosocial firm behavior, including the promotion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. In new research, Dhruv Aggarwal, Albert H. Choi, and Yoon-Ho Alex Lee find evidence that the exact opposite took place.

The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Not Help Grocery Competition

Kroger and Albertsons say they need to merge to compete with Walmart. Claire Kelloway argues that what they really want is Walmart’s monopsony power, and permitting mergers on these grounds will only harm suppliers, workers, and consumers.

Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation

Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.

Letter to the Editor: Former FTC and DOJ Chief Economists Urge Separation of Economic and Legal Analysis in Merger Guidelines

Seventeen former chief economists of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division urge current Agency heads to separate the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines to strengthen the role of the latter in merger review.