Income Distribution Commons^™

Employer Power: Consequences For Wages, Inequality And Spillovers, Ihsaan Bassier

Doctoral Dissertations

In several countries, wages have stagnated and union membership declined, even as productivity has increased. The established view of employers helpless to the labor market's invisible hand has increasingly come under question. Attention has turned towards the power of employers to set wages; yet only recently have the data required to investigate this – observing workers at their employers – become available, and then mostly in richer countries. My first chapter, “Monopsony in Movers” (co-authored with Arindrajit Dube and Suresh Naidu), proposes a new credible estimation strategy to measure employer monopsony power. We build on the idea that employers with …

Essays On Inequality, Growth, And Economic Policy, Philipp E. Erfurth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that study inequality and regional economics in a historical and development context.

The first chapter examines regional inequality among Habsburg regions from the 19th century to today’s EU by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software to recreate historical regions in present-day projections. The findings suggests that regional disparities are markedly higher today than in the 19th century, despite rapid convergence in the past two decades. The study thus provides evidence of retrospective determinism in the study of the Habsburg economy and suggests that, although regional EU policy has been successful over the past two …

Save, Gamble, Or Both? The Relationship Between Premium Bond Sales And Lottery Sales In The United Kingdom, Kaden Grace

Honors Theses

Four out of every ten Americans are unable to pay for an unexpected $400 bill out of their savings accounts. To ameliorate this problem, one policy to incentivize saving is a Prize-Linked Savings Account (PLSA). Unlike a traditional savings account that pays out a consistent rate of return, a PLSA pools the interest on all deposits and distributes the returns in randomly drawn prizes (similar to a lottery). However, PLSAs remain illegal in many areas due to a concern that the introduction of a private or public PLSA could cannibalize revenue from an existing state-sponsored lottery, thus restricting the state’s …

Exploring The Generational Evolution Of Black-White Wage Inequality Across Geographic Regions Of The United States, Rachel Scharff-Hansen

CMC Senior Theses

Wages of black men trail those of their white counterparts despite decades of generational socio-political change. This paper examines the extent to which the black-white wage gap has evolved from individuals born in the Baby Boomer (births between 1956 and 1964) to the Millennial (births between 1977 and 1995) generation, an era assumed to reflect great shifts in anti-racist sentiments and opportunities in the late 20^th century. Despite presumed progressive attitudes developed in this time period, I find that the black-white wage differential of the labor market in its whole has worsened from black earnings lagging 28.1% behind white …

The Leveling Spirit: Violence And Inequality In Postwar Iraq, Griffin Perrault

Honors Theses

The Iraq War (2003–2011) constitutes by some estimates one of the deadliest and most destructive conflicts of the 21st century (Hagopian et al., 2013). In addition to the disputed figures of excess violent civilian casualties––generally ranging from 180,000 to 210,000 deaths––the war has created one of the major refugee crises of modern times, with 1 in 25 Iraqis estimated to have been displaced from their homes by the 2003 invasion (Costs of War, 2021). While much of this violence has been wrought by American and Iraqi coalition troops, violence against civilians has also been perpetuated by insurgent groups and paramilitary …

From American Dream To American Reality: The Effect Of Educational Expenditures On Intergenerational Mobility And The Great Gatsby Curve, Isabel Krogh

Honors Projects

Income inequality and intergenerational mobility are two common measures of economic fairness in society. While they measure distinct ideas, they are significantly related in an inverse way across countries as well as across regions in the United States. This relationship is illustrated on the Great Gatsby Curve. Unequal access to education is one factor that has been found to drive the negative relationship between these two measures and therefore create the negatively sloping Great Gatsby Curve. Therefore, creating more equal access to education, such as through government spending, could lessen the connection between these two factors. The primary purpose of …

Investigating The Impacts Of Monetary Policy On Income Inequality In Developed Nations: Case Study Of The Euro Area, Japan And The United States, Hector Martinez Garcia

Masters Theses

This paper tries to evaluate the effect that unconventional monetary policy has had on income inequality for the set of Eurozone countries, the United States and Japan using an unbalanced panel data model over the period from 1980 to 2021, first jointly and then individually, using different regressions for each case. Based on the regression model analyzed, the study attempts to analyze the relationship between money supply and income inequality as measured by the Gini index using fixed effects and random effects for our panel data model. The study reveals the importance of the money supply variable in reducing inequality …