Drawing on the author’s work, this lecture presents evidence on U.S. income and wealth inequality. It presents series for top income and wealth shares, and the distribution of economic growth by income groups. It discusses the mechanisms behind the evolution of U.S. income and wealth inequality from historical and comparative perspectives. It analyzes the role of public policy and in particular...

This study examined the mechanisms by which income inequality among households with elderly members changed from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, focusing on the transformation of household structure and on income sources. The data that I analyze in this paper comes from the Comprehensive Survey of People’s Living Conditions in Japan (CSLCJ) conducted by the Japan Ministry of Health, Labour and ...

This paper presents a simple model to show that, in addition to technological development and global outsourcing, heterogeneous lifetime preferences for leisure are essential to income inequality. Allocating leisure time to studying is viewed as suffering in exchange for future comfort, and income inequality in a country arises when some prefer the leisure trade-off but others prefer smooth lei...

Households became more geographically segregated by income in the United States between 1970 and 1990. Research shows that growing up in a poor neighborhood is associated with worse outcomes for children. This suggests that economic segregation may be harmful to children. Economic inequality also increased between 1970 and 1980. Theoretical arguments suggest that the increase in inequality led ...

This paper addresses the dynamics of income inequality, both within and across countries. In an endogenous growth model with North-South trade, the dynamics of income inequality depend on the ability of workers to adapt to new technologies, captured by the quality of education. For developing countries with low quality of education, Southern trade liberalization leads to: 1) an overall decline ...

This paper provides an overview of methodologies used to analyze inter-regional income inequality, and a critical survey of empirical studies that deal with Russian regions. It discusses implications of the growth theory regarding dynamics of inter-economy income inequality. Methodologies for empirically analyzing income inequality are classified as the cross-section approach, time series appro...

State-level income inequality has been found to have an effect on individual health outcomes, even when controlled for important individual-level variables such as income, education, age, and gender. The effect of income inequality on health may not be immediate and may, in fact, have a substantial lag time between exposure to inequality and eventual health outcome. We used the 2006 American Co...

Abstract This paper tracks distributional changes over the last quarter of the twentieth century. We focus on three conceptually distinct distributions: the distribution of wages, the distribution of annual earnings and the distribution of total family income adjusted for family size. We show that all three distributions became less equal during the last half of the 1970’s and the 1980’s. This ...

This article reviews 98 aggregate and multilevel studies examining the associations between income inequality and health. Overall, there seems to be little support for the idea that income inequality is a major, generalizable determinant of population health differences within or between rich countries. Income inequality may, however, directly influence some health outcomes, such as homicide in...

BACKGROUND Over the past decades, both health inequalities and income inequalities have been increasing in many European countries, but it is unknown whether and how these trends are related. We test the hypothesis that trends in health inequalities and trends in income inequalities are related, i.e. that countries with a stronger increase in income inequalities have also experienced a stronger...