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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Trouble In The Tails? What We Know About Earnings Nonresponse 30 Years After Lillard, Smith, And Welch, Christopher R. Bollinger, Barry T. Hirsch, Charles M. Hokayem, James P. Ziliak Oct 2019

Trouble In The Tails? What We Know About Earnings Nonresponse 30 Years After Lillard, Smith, And Welch, Christopher R. Bollinger, Barry T. Hirsch, Charles M. Hokayem, James P. Ziliak

Economics Faculty Publications

Earnings nonresponse in household surveys is widespread, yet there is limited knowledge of how nonresponse biases earnings measures. We examine the consequences of nonresponse on earnings gaps and inequality using Current Population Survey individual records linked to administrative earnings data. The common assumption that earnings are missing at random is rejected. Nonresponse across the earnings distribution is U-shaped, highest in the left and right tails. Inequality measures differ between household and administrative data due in part to nonresponse. Nonresponse biases earnings differentials by race, gender, and education, particularly in the tails. Flexible copula-based models can account for nonrandom nonresponse.


Immigrants And The U.S. Wage Distribution, Vasil I. Yasenov Oct 2019

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 …


The Law And Economics Of Redistribution, Matthew Dimick Oct 2019

The Law And Economics Of Redistribution, Matthew Dimick

Journal Articles

Should legal rules be used to redistribute income? Or should income taxation be the exclusive means for reducing income inequality? This article reviews the legal scholarship on this question. First, it traces how the most widely cited argument in favor of using taxes exclusively--Kaplow & Shavell's (1994) double-distortion argument--evolved from previous debates about whether legal rules could even be redistributive and whether law and economics should be concerned exclusively with efficiency or with distribution as well. Next, it surveys the responses to the double-distortion argument. These responses appear to have had only limited success in challenging the sturdy reputation of …


Toward Fair And Sustainable Capitalism: A Comprehensive Proposal To Help American Workers, Restore Fair Gainsharing Between Employees And Shareholders, And Increase American Competitiveness By Reorienting Our Corporate Governance System Toward Sustainable Long-Term Growth And Encouraging Investments In America’S Future, Leo E. Strine Jr. Sep 2019

Toward Fair And Sustainable Capitalism: A Comprehensive Proposal To Help American Workers, Restore Fair Gainsharing Between Employees And Shareholders, And Increase American Competitiveness By Reorienting Our Corporate Governance System Toward Sustainable Long-Term Growth And Encouraging Investments In America’S Future, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

To promote fair and sustainable capitalism and help business and labor work together to build an American economy that works for all, this paper presents a comprehensive proposal to reform the American corporate governance system by aligning the incentives of those who control large U.S. corporations with the interests of working Americans who must put their hard-earned savings in mutual funds in their 401(k) and 529 plans. The proposal would achieve this through a series of measured, coherent changes to current laws and regulations, including: requiring not just operating companies, but institutional investors, to give appropriate consideration to and make …


Earnings Dynamics And Firm-Level Shocks, Benjamin Friedrich, Lisa Laun, Costas Meghir, Luigi Pistaferri Apr 2019

Earnings Dynamics And Firm-Level Shocks, Benjamin Friedrich, Lisa Laun, Costas Meghir, Luigi Pistaferri

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We use matched employer-employee data from Sweden to study the role of the firm in affecting the stochastic properties of wages. Our model accounts for endogenous participation and mobility decisions. We find that firm-specific permanent productivity shocks transmit to individual wages, but the effect is mostly concentrated among the high-skilled workers; firm-specific temporary shocks mostly affect the low-skilled. The updates to worker-firm specific match effects over the life of a firm-worker relationship are small. Substantial growth in earnings variance over the life cycle for high-skilled workers is driven by firms accounting for 44% of cross-sectional variance by age 55.


Building An Equitable And Inclusive City Through Housing Policies: Singapore’S Experience, Sock Yong Phang Apr 2019

Building An Equitable And Inclusive City Through Housing Policies: Singapore’S Experience, Sock Yong Phang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Inequality is an age-old concern. In recent years, the rise of income inequality has received worldwide media and policy attention, beginning with the Occupy movement of 2011-2012 and a wave of notable scholastic books such as Stiglitz (2012), Piketty (2014), and Atkinson (2015). Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, an unlikely bestseller, contained a vast amount of data showing that the rich are taking rising shares of income and wealth in the advanced economies. Piketty’s approach towards capital and wealth is an aggregative one, and he does not treat real estate or land as a different or distinct form of …


Investment Treaties, Investor-State Dispute Settlement, And Inequality: How International Investment Treaties Exacerbate Domestic Disparities, Lise Johnson, Lisa E. Sachs Jan 2019

Investment Treaties, Investor-State Dispute Settlement, And Inequality: How International Investment Treaties Exacerbate Domestic Disparities, Lise Johnson, Lisa E. Sachs

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Over roughly the past four decades, government officials from around the world have been erecting a framework of economic governance with major – but under-appreciated – implications for intra-national inequality. The components of this framework are thousands of bilateral and multilateral treaties designed to protect international investment. In many jurisdictions, the treaties have been concluded without public awareness or scrutiny or even much discussion or analysis by government officials – including those officials responsible for negotiating the agreements(Poulsen 2015) – and without an adequate understanding of how these agreements could affect intra-national inequality. Long imperceptible, the size and power of …


Data Literacy In Economic Development, Simon Halliday Jan 2019

Data Literacy In Economic Development, Simon Halliday

Economics: Faculty Publications

In economic development and other economics electives, students regularly encounter economic measures of absolute and relative deprivation, from poverty measures like the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke index to measures of distribution like the Gini index. By “doing economics,” students practice applying economic measurement to real-world data and develop more general data literacy. The author proposes a series of exercises starting with stylized 10-household economies, proceeding to nationally representative cross-sectional surveys using MS Excel or Google Spreadsheets, and culminating in students applying their acquired data literacy to a team project. The data sources are easily tailored to alternative household surveys in low- and middle-income …