Inequality & Distribution

Back-room deals on corporate tax reform won’t increase growth

Greater efficiency, lower costs, and universal coverage make it the sustainable option, say some top economists

Professor Ghilarducci describes the roadblocks to securing retirement and retirement plans beyond the 401k.

A new model probes why the US leads the world in jailing and imprisoning people, and what it will take to reverse course

Demand, Secular Stagnation and the Vanishing Middle-Class

How austerity policies and microfinance can bankrupt rather than empower women. Professor Girón discusses why microfinance cannot replace development banks.

In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

Professor Dutt discusses how group identity is key to addressing inequality and how inequality can disrupt group identity.

In his 2017 presidential address to the National Economic Association, Professor Darrick Hamilton warned that treating economics as a morally neutral ‘science’, and the discipline’s limited attention to structural barriers and overemphasis individual agency, has resulted in bad economics, and bad policy particularly as it relates to racial disparity.

The “War on Poverty,” and the impact of public policy

A new book by economist Peter Temin finds that the U.S. is no longer one country, but dividing into two separate economic and political worlds

Despite dismissive comments by the U.S. Treasury Secretary, facing the challenge posed by robotics replacing human labor raises key public policy questions 

In this comment, we explain our objections to the SEC’s current formulation of the Pay Ratio Disclosure Rule on each of three grounds: the erroneous estimation of CEO pay; the unclear specification of the “median” worker; and the risk of normalizing a pay ratio that is far too high. Then we present the latest data on the remuneration of the 500 highest-paid CEOs in the United States, demonstrating the way in which the SEC’s measure of CEO pay that enters into the CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio tends to systematically underestimate actual executive pay.

The health crisis afflicting working-class Americans recalls similar symptoms in Russia following the collapse of communism