Inequality & Distribution

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 analyzes the country-specific effects of inequality within a stock-flow consistent macro model and within a DSGE model with heterogeneous and interacting households.

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 establishes a long-run global picture of economic inequality as revealed by fiscal records and analyzes the long-run drivers of inequality as well as the distributional impact of banking crises.

This research project explores the interaction between group identities and decisions to engage in collective action to secure access to public goods, such as education.

We analyse the link between income distribution and the current account for the period 1972-2007. We find that rising (top-end) personal inequality leads to a decrease of the current account, ceteris paribus.

Germany’s economic policies are under attack from all sides.

In our two papers, we analyze how changes in personal and functional (wages versus profits) income distribution interact to produce different macroeconomic outcomes in different countries. On the basis of a stock-flow consistent model calibrated for the United States, Germany, and China, simulations suggest that a substantial part of the increase in household debt and the decrease in the current account in the United States since the early 1980s can be explained by the interplay of rising (top-end) household income inequality and certain institutions (e.g. easy access to credit, privately financed education and health care systems).

We develop a three-country, stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model to study the effects of changes in both personal and functional income distribution on national current account balances.

Inequalities in skills are fundamentally linked to economic and social inequalities.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

What’s behind rapidly worsening inequality in the United States?

Every nation faces the challenge of imagining what a good life means. Sound nutrition, shelter, health care, personal safety, social stability, security of savings, clean air and water, and the development of children are among the elements of what many envision as vital to a happy and healthy society.

The battle for a living wage for the nation’s poorest workers is set against the backdrop of mass unemployment and the highest level of economic inequality in the U.S. in almost a century.

We are coming up to the fifth anniversary of the Lehman crash in September 2008. How bad was it? Have we fixed the problems?