Digital Commons Network^™

Firms, Jobs, And Gender Disparities In Top Incomes: Evidence From Brazil, Felipe Benguria

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper studies the gender disparities among top incomes in Brazil during the period 1994-2013 using administrative data on the universe of formal-sector job spells and detailed information on educational attainment, employers, and occupations performed. Over these two decades, differences in pay and participation between genders have narrowed, yet the process has been slow and women are still severely underrepresented, especially within the very top percentiles of the earnings distribution. The following findings highlight the role of firms and occupations in explaining these patterns. At the start of the period, women in the top percentile of the distribution owe a …

Impacts Of The Covid-19 Pandemic And The Cares Act On Earnings And Inequality, Guido Matias Cortes, Eliza C. Forsythe

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.

A Letter To The United States Government On Wealth And Income Inequality, Matthieu Maier

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The United States of America is the world’s hotspot when it comes to income and wealth inequality. The wealthiest Americans are accumulating more and more wealth everyday while most Americans, who fall somewhere around middle-class, remain struggling and stagnant. The United States’ unchecked and deregulated system of capitalism is the root cause of our country’s inequities along with our government’s refusal to set aside self-interests and biases in order to combat these issues. From the inequality caused by rouged American systems larger issues are created that lead to complications in health, wages, standard of living, and race relations within our …

Visualizing Income Distribution In The United States, Sang T. Truong, Humberto Barreto

Annual Student Research Poster Session

Background: Visit https://sites.google.com/depauw.edu/incomedistributionviz/home to see a novel, eye-catching visual display of the income distribution in the United States that conveys fundamental information about the evolution and current level of income inequality to a wide audience. We use IPUMS CPS data to create household income deciles adjusted for price level and household size for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia from 1976 to 2018. We adjust for state price differences from 2008 to 2018. Plotting these data gives a 3D chart that provides a startling picture of income differences within and across states over time. Those interested …

Impacts Of The Covid-19 Pandemic And The Cares Act On Earnings And Inequality, Guido Matias Cortes, Eliza C. Forsythe

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we show that the Covid-19 pandemic led to a loss of aggregate real labor earnings of more than $250 billion between March and July 2020. By exploiting the panel structure of the CPS, we show that the decline in aggregate earnings was entirely driven by declines in employment; individuals who remained employed did not experience any atypical earnings changes. We find that job losses were substantially larger among workers in low-paying jobs. This led to a dramatic increase in inequality in labor earnings during the pandemic. Simulating standard unemployment benefits and Unemployment …

Climbing To 1011: Globalization, Digitization, Shareholder Capitalism And The Summits Of Contemporary Wealth, David A. Westbrook

Journal Articles

While we may find many sorts of inequality in the United States and elsewhere, this essay is about the specific form of inequality exemplified by Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, that is, the Himalayan summits of contemporary wealth, mostly in the United States. Such wealth results from the confluence of three historical developments.

First, the social processes referred to under the rubric of “globalization” have created vast markets. A dominant position in such markets leads not only to great wealth, but the elimination of peers. Since there are few such markets, relatively significant wealth is possessed by very few people. …

Delhi Green Deal, Rohit Azad, Shouvik Chakraborty

PERI Working Papers

In this paper, we propose a carbon tax policy for Delhi, the most polluted capital in the world, which will fundamentally change the energy mix of Delhi’s economy toward clean, green energy and will guarantee universal access to electricity, transport and food, up to a certain amount. Any carbon mitigation strategy needs to alter our dependence on fossil fuels, requiring a systemic overhaul of its energy mix. Implementing a carbon tax will mitigate emissions and mobilise revenue for our proposed re-distributive program of Right to Food, Energy and Travel (RFET). The policy is designed to prefer ‘the poor over the …

An Experiment On The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Causes And Impact On Inequality, Antonio J. Morales, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara

ESI Working Papers

Testing causal relationships expressed by mathematical models on facts about human behaviour across history is challenging. A prominent example is the Neolithic agricultural revolution [1]. Many theoretical models of the adoption of agriculture has been put forward [2] but none has been tested. The only exception is [3], that uses a computational approach with agent-based simulations of evolutionary games. Here, we propose two games that resemble the conditions of human societies before and after the agricultural revolution. The agricultural revolution is modelled as an exogenous shock in the lab (n=180, 60 independent groups), and the transition from foraging to farming …

Foot Traffic & Walkable Urbanism, Ember Smith, Mary Blankenship, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown

Transportation & Infrastructure

This fact sheet highlights the performance and expansion of WalkUPs (regionally significant, walkable areas) with a focus on Denver, Los Angeles, Orlando, Phoenix, and Las Vegas as detailed in Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros, a report by George Washington University.

Economic Segregation, Inequality, And The New Urban Crisis In The Mountain West, Ember Smith, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown

Housing & Real Estate

This fact sheet highlights economic segregation, inequality, and the effect of the “New Urban Crisis” in the Mountain West region (Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah) as computed and analyzed by Richard Florida in The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class- and What We Can Do About it.

Immigrants And The U.S. Wage Distribution, Vasil I. Yasenov

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

A large body of literature estimates the relative wage impacts of immigration on low- and high-skill natives, but it is unclear how these effects map onto changes of the wage distribution. I document the movement of foreign-born workers in the U.S. wage distribution, showing that, since 1980, they have become increasingly overrepresented in the bottom. Downgrading of education and experience obtained abroad partially drives this pattern. I then undertake two empirical approaches to deepen our understanding of the way foreign-born workers shape the wage structure. First, I estimate a standard theoretical model featuring constant elasticity of substitution technology and skill …

Refocusing Loyalty Programs In The Era Of Big Data: A Societal Lens Paradigm, Valeria Stourm, Scott A. Neslin, Eric T. Bradlow, Els Breugelmans, So Yeon Chun, Pedro Gardete, P. K. Kannan, Praveen Kopalle, Young-Hoon Park, David Restrepo Amariles, Raphael Thomadsen, Yuping Liu-Thompkins, Rajkumar Venkatesan

Marketing Faculty Publications

Big data and technological change have enabled loyalty programs to become more prevalent and complex. How these developments influence society has been overlooked, both in academic research and in practice. We argue why this issue is important and propose a framework to refocus loyalty programs in the era of big data through a societal lens. We focus on three aspects of the societal lens-inequality, privacy, and sustainability. We discuss how loyalty programs in the big data era impact each of these societal factors, and then illustrate how, by adopting this societal lens paradigm, researchers and practitioners can generate insights and …

Large Devaluations And Inflation Inequality: Evidence From Brazil, Raphael Rocha Gouvea

Economics Department Working Paper Series

In the aftermath of large devaluations, prices of tradable goods and lower-priced varieties increase significantly more than the prices of nontradables and higher-priced varieties. These relative price changes may lead to inflation inequality when household consumption baskets are different across the distribution of income. Using Cravino and Levchenko [2017]’s methodology, we show that inflation for poor households in Brazil was at least 11 percentage points higher than for rich ones in the aftermath of the 2002 large devaluation. A detailed case study of the City of São Paulo estimates an inflation inequality ranging from 8 to 11 percentage points in …