Inequality & Distribution

Inequality and distribution—areas underserved by mainstream economics—sit at the heart of The Institute’s work. This program brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines to develop alternative approaches to the problem of inequality.

The Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO) is an interdisciplinary collaboration incorporating biological, sociological and psychological perspectives into traditional economic questions of inequality and human capital.

Chaired by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence, INET has assembled a global team of leaders and scholars calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

The Private Debt initiative is an opportunity to articulate how private debt impacts the economy and to specify the pathways for its effects. The initiative will also lead to better knowledge for the use of regulators, policymakers, journalists, and the public. Finally, the Private Debt initiative will open a better-informed dialogue towards tangible solutions to the problems posed by excessive private debt.

This research project designs and evaluates new strategies that can address the issues of financing human capital investments by developing and estimating a unified framework.

This research project investigates how gender and race affect the earnings of African American, Latina, and Asian American women in the United States over five decades, from 1970 to 2010.

This research project incorporates recent US data to update empirical analyses of regional growth and utilizes case study strategies of American regions to investigate the underlying causal mechanisms of inequality.

This research project aims at analyzing the role of economic models in economic policy-making. Specifically, we investigate the impact of CGE models, related to the TTIP debate, and potential output models, related to fiscal policy in the EU, on politicial decision-making and public debate.

This research project posits that increasing income concentration and erosion of the middle class are interrelated results of a change in the dominant corporate resource-allocation regime from “retain-and-reinvest” to “downsize-and-distribute,” manifested by massive distributions to shareholders and the disappearance of “collective and cumulative” careers.

This research project studies the evolution of monetary policy since the financial crisis, as regards to changes in implementation mechanisms and use of conventional/unconventional instruments of monetary policy, as well as its mpact on macroeconomic variables, including income distribution.

The objective of this proposal is to build distributional statistics of income and wealth consistent with national accounts aggregates for the United States.

This research project uses macroeconomic data going back to the mid-19th century to analyze issues such as the relation between income distribution and economic growth; and how debt, asset prices, and growth moved together the last 160 years.

This research project develops a “Money View” analysis of the recent evolution of China’s financial system.

This research project lays a foundation for new and better long-run estimates of poverty and inequality around the world through the collection, digitisation, and harmonisation of household budget data.

This research project addresses the problem of inferring causal relationships in economics. It investigates the philosophical roots of the problem and develops econometric tools which take into account the complexity of economic systems.