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173 publications found, searching for 'The Distribution of Income and Wealth '
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Working Paper No. 1079
April 04, 2025
Job Allocation in the Levy Institute Microsimulation Model
AbstractThe Levy Institute Microsimulation Model (LIMM) is a tool used for policy simulations to estimate ex-ante the employment and income effects of sectoral investments. In Istenes (2023), a simple implementation of the LIMM for New York State initially had difficulty producing realistic conditional distributions of allocated jobs. This paper identifies the sources of that problem, […]
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Research Project Report
March 19, 2024
Integrating Nonmarket Consumption into the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey
AbstractIn spring 2021, under the direction and encouragement of Commissioner William Beach, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) kicked off a major initiative—to produce a measure of consumption to supplement the release of consumer expenditures. The production of such a measure would fill a data gap regarding household economic well-being. For years BLS staff, […]
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Working Paper No. 1037
January 10, 2024
Markups, Profit Shares, and Cost-Push-Profit-Led Inflation
AbstractThe post-pandemic surge in inflation was accompanied by a surge in the corporate share of profits. As a result, several economists and policy makers have given to it names such as “profit-led inflation” or “sellers’ inflation.” The present paper discusses the extent to which profit-led inflation, as an explanation for the recent surge in inflation, […]
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Working Paper No. 1028
August 21, 2023
Contractionary Effects of Foreign Price Shocks (and Potentially Expansionary Effects of Inflation)
AbstractUsing the model proposed in Krugman and Taylor’s “Contractionary effects of devaluation” (1978), we examine the macroeconomic effects of shocks to foreign prices. We show that these shocks can be contractionary for two reasons: (i) because they imply a loss of income if an economy has a trade deficit or import prices increase proportionally more […]
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Working Paper No. 1026
August 01, 2023
Banking Sector, Distributive Conflict, and Monetary Theory of Distribution
AbstractThis paper analyzes the implications of distributional contrast for the monetary theory of distribution. The first step is to try to introduce the banking sector within Pivetti's monetary distribution theory approach. Pivetti in fact does not analyze the links between the central bank and the banking sector. It therefore seems interesting to study what role […]
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Research Project Report
June 30, 2022
Assessing the Impact of Childcare Expansion in Mexico
AbstractThere is broad consensus in both research and policy circles that one of the key reasons for a lack of progress in reducing gender gaps in employment and wages is the persistent gender imbalance in unpaid work, three-quarters of which is performed by women. Universal access to quality care services enables the reduction of this […]
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Policy Notes No. 2
May 13, 2021
Gender and Race in the Spotlight during the COVID-19 Pandemic
AbstractResearch Scholar Luiza Nassif-Pires, Luísa Cardoso, and Ana Luíza Matos de Oliveira analyze the importance of the “emergency benefit” (Auxílio Emergencial) in containing the increase in poverty and extreme poverty in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic. They find the emergency benefit mitigated the loss of income, brought the poverty rate to historically low levels, and […]
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Working Paper No. 983
February 05, 2021
Intrahousehold Allocation of Household Production
AbstractIn this working paper, we analyze factors that may explain gender differences in the allocation of time to household production in sub-Saharan Africa. The study uses time use survey data to analyze the determinants of time spent on household production by husbands and wives in nuclear families in Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, and South Africa. We […]
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Working Paper No. 967
September 07, 2020
Quality of Statistical Match Used in the Estimation of the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) for Italy 2008 and 2014 and Preliminary Results
AbstractThis paper assesses the quality of the statistical matching used in the LIMTIP estimates for Italy for 2008 and 2014. The match combines the 2008–9 and 2013–14 Italian Time Use Survey (IT-TUS) with the Italian data collected for the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (IT-SILC) in 2009 and 2015. After the matching, the […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 153
September 04, 2020
Multidimensional Inequality and COVID-19 in Brazil
AbstractAfter spending over 6 percent of GDP responding to the COVID-19 crisis, Brazil has suffered among the worst per capita numbers in the world in terms of cases and deaths. In this policy brief, Luiza Nassif-Pires, Laura Carvalho, and Eduardo Rawet explore how stark inequalities along racial, regional, and class lines can help account for […]
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Working Paper No. 954
April 30, 2020
Household Consumption, Household Indebtedness, and Inequality in Turkey
AbstractThis paper examines whether relative income and income inequality within reference groups affect household consumption. Using the explanations of consumption behavior based on Dusenberry’s relative income hypothesis, we test if household consumption levels in Turkey are affected by the household’s relative position and inequality in the reference group between 2005–12 by employing cross-sectional household-level data. […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 149
April 14, 2020
Pandemic of Inequality
AbstractThe costs of the COVID-19 pandemic—in terms of both the health risks and economic burdens—will be borne disproportionately by the most vulnerable segments of US society. In this public policy brief, Luiza Nassif-Pires, Laura de Lima Xavier, Thomas Masterson, Michalis Nikiforos, and Fernando Rios-Avila demonstrate that the COVID-19 crisis is likely to widen already-worrisome levels […]
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Working Paper No. 930
May 21, 2019
A Semi-Parametric Approach to the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition with Continuous Group Variable and Self-Selection
AbstractThis paper describes the application of a semiparametric approach, known as a varying coefficients model (Hastie and Tibshirani 1993), to implement a Oaxaca-Blinder type of decomposition in the presence of self-selection into treatment groups for a continuum of comparison groups. The flexibility of this methodology may allow for detecting heterogeneity of the role of endowment […]
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Working Paper No. 928
May 13, 2019
Democratizing Money
AbstractIn the Western interpretation of democracy, governments exist in order to manage relations of property, with absence of property ownership leading to exclusion from participation in governance and, in many cases, absence of equal treatment before the law. Democratizing money will therefore ensure equal opportunity to the ownership of property, and thus full participation in […]
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Working Paper No. 927
April 26, 2019
Recentered Influence Functions in Stata
AbstractRecentered influence functions (RIFs) are statistical tools popularized by Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009) for analyzing unconditional partial effects on quantiles in a regression analysis framework (unconditional quantile regressions). The flexibility and simplicity of these tools has opened the possibility of extending the analysis to other distributional statistics using linear regressions or decomposition approaches. In […]
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One-Pager No. 57
September 10, 2018
Stagnating Economic Well-Being Amid Rising Government Support
AbstractThe Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) was designed to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the changes affecting household living standards. Ajit Zacharias, Thomas Masterson, and Fernando Rios-Avila summarize their latest research on the trends in economic well-being for US households. They reveal historic stagnation in LIMEW growth over the 2000–13 period, as […]
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Public Policy Brief No. 146
August 16, 2018
Stagnating Economic Well-Being and Unrelenting Inequality
AbstractAjit Zacharias, Thomas Masterson, and Fernando Rios-Avila update the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) for US households for the period 2000–13. The LIMEW—which comprises base income, income from wealth, net government expenditures, and the value of household production—is aimed at achieving a more comprehensive understanding of trends in living standards. This policy brief […]
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Policy Notes No. 4
May 31, 2018
Wage Employment and the Prospects of Women’s Economic Empowerment
AbstractIn this policy note, Thomas Masterson and Ajit Zacharias address the nexus between wage employment, consumption poverty, and time deficits in the context of Ghana and Tanzania. Based on a recently completed research project supported by the Hewlett Foundation, the authors apply the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty (LIMTCP) to estimate whether […]
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Working Paper No. 901
March 06, 2018
Income Distribution, Household Debt, and Aggregate Demand
AbstractDuring the period leading up to the recession of 2007–08, there was a large increase in household debt relative to income, a large increase in measured consumption as a fraction of GDP, and a shift toward more unequal income distribution. It is sometimes claimed that these three developments were closely linked. In these stories, the […]
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Policy Notes No. 4
November 09, 2017
How Time Deficits and Hidden Poverty Undermine the Sustainable Development Goals
AbstractThe predominant framework for measuring poverty rests on an implicit assumption that everyone has enough time available to devote to household production or enough resources to compensate for deficits in household production by purchasing market substitutes. Senior Scholar Ajit Zacharias argues that this implicit bias in our official poverty statistics threatens to undermine the Sustainable […]
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Working Paper No. 885
February 27, 2017
Quality of Statistical Match of Household Budget Survey and SILC for Turkey
AbstractThis paper presents the quality analysis of the statistical matching conducted for a research study on household consumption behavior, household indebtedness, and inequality for Turkey. The match has been done for four years (2005, 2008, 2009, and 2012) of Household Budget Surveys (HBS) and the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC). The aim of […]
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Working Paper No. 880
January 04, 2017
The Great Recession and Racial Inequality
AbstractThe Great Recession had a tremendous impact on low-income Americans, in particular black and Latino Americans. The losses in terms of employment and earnings are matched only by the losses in terms of real wealth. In many ways, however, these losses are merely a continuation of trends that have been unfolding for more than two […]
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Working Paper No. 879
December 22, 2016
Distribution-led Growth through Methodological Lenses
AbstractThis paper presents a methodological discussion of two recent “endogeneity” critiques of the Kaleckian model and the concept of distribution-led growth. From a neo-Keynesian perspective, and following Kaldor (1955) and Robinson (1956), the model is criticized because it treats distribution as quasi-exogenous, while in Skott (2016) distribution is viewed as endogenously determined by a series […]
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Working Paper No. 873
September 13, 2016
Quality of Match for Statistical Matches Used in the Development of the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Consumption Poverty (LIMTCP) for Ghana and Tanzania
AbstractThis document presents a description of the quality of match of the statistical matches used in the LIMTCP estimates prepared for Ghana and Tanzania. For Ghana, the statistical match combines the Living Standards Survey Round 6 (GLSS6) with the Ghana Time Use Survey (GTUS) 2009, and for Tanzania it combines the Household Budget Survey (THBS) […]
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