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Could More Progressive Taxes Increase Income Inequality?
One paper posits that making taxes more progressive could boost lower-income households initially, but more money would eventually float to those with higher incomes.
“Parasite,” COVID-19, and U.S. Wealth Inequality
The movie “Parasite” focuses on two South Korean families on the opposite ends of the wealth spectrum. What insights can it provide about wealth inequality in the U.S.?
Working Paper
Intergenerational Linkages in Household Credit
We document economically important correlations between children?s future credit outcomes and their parents? credit risk scores, default, and the extent of credit constraints ? intergenerational linkages in household credit. Using observations on siblings, we find that the linkages are due to unobserved household heterogeneity rather than parental credit conditions directly affecting children?s credit outcomes. In particular, in the sample of siblings, there is no correlation between parental and child credit attributes after controlling for household fixed effects. The linkages are stronger ...
Working Paper
Why did Rich Families Increase their Fertility? Inequality and Marketization of Child Care
A negative relationship between income and fertility has persisted for so long that its existence is often taken for granted. One economic theory builds on this relationship and argues that rising inequality leads to greater differential fertility between rich and poor. We show that the relationship between income and fertility has ?attened between 1980 and 2010 in the US, a time of increasing inequality, as high income families increased their fertility. These facts challenge the standard theory. We propose that marketization of parental time costs can explain the changing relationship ...
Journal Article
Income Inequality Matters, but Mobility Is Just as Important
Concerns about rising income inequality are based on comparing income distributions over time. It is important to remember that such distributions are snapshots of a single year, and that the same households do not necessarily appear year after year in the same quintile of the distribution. Paying attention to mobility, as well as inequality, gives us a richer picture of the income possibilities for households over time. We document changes in a measure of income mobility over the past 40 years, a period in which income inequality has increased. We find a modest level of movement through the ...
Working Paper
Household Incomes in Tax Data : Using Addresses to Move from Tax Unit to Household Income Distributions
Tax return data are increasingly the standard for tracking income statistics in the United States. However, these data have traditionally been limited by their inability to capture non-filers and to identify members of separate tax units living in the same household. We overcome these obstacles and create household records directly in the tax data using mailing address information included on tax forms. We then present the first set of tax-based household income and inequality measures for the entire income distribution. When comparing household income inequality results in the tax data to ...