Category Archives: Inequality

Everyone thinks they’re middle-class

Posted on April 12, 2010 by andrewleigh

Rob Bray points out to me some interesting data from 1999, in which Peter Saunders (SPRC, UNSW) asked respondents to place themselves in an income decile. Of course, 1/10th of the population falls in each decile, so if people are … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality | 5 Comments

Top Incomes in Australia, Updated

Posted on April 7, 2010 by andrewleigh

Some years ago, I published a paper with Tony Atkinson looking at trends in Australian top incomes since 1921. We’ve now updated the results to the 2007-08 tax year (the latest available from the ATO). Here’s the Excel spreadsheet. The … Continue reading →

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Social Mobility in China

Posted on April 6, 2010 by andrewleigh

Cathy Gong, Xin Meng and I have a new paper out, looking at intergenerational mobility in urban China. After making a bunch of adjustments to the data, we find a strikingly high intergenerational elasticity (implying a very low level of … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality | 1 Comment

Do Redistributive State Taxes Reduce Inequality?

Posted on March 2, 2010 by andrewleigh

A few years ago, I did some work on the impact of progressive taxes at the state level (in the US). There’s a theory around that high-income workers flee progressive taxes, and therefore that they have no effect on post-tax … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality, Tax | 3 Comments

Mind the Gap?

Posted on March 2, 2010 by andrewleigh

My AFR op-ed today is on the economics and philosophy of inequality. Full text over the fold. I’ve hyperlinked the cited studies. Two others that I can also heartily recommend are a paper by Gary Burtless & Christopher Jencks, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics of Education, Inequality, Low Wage Work | 8 Comments

Permanent Income Inequality

Posted on February 14, 2010 by andrewleigh

I have a paper out, looking at income mobility from year to year, and how it affects estimates of inequality. One reason for writing the paper was to address the critique “sure, the US is unequal if you just use … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality | 3 Comments

We’ll always have (the wrong number in) Paris

Posted on February 12, 2010 by andrewleigh

I blogged last year on the difficulty I’ve been having in getting the OECD to correctly quote a paper that I wrote on intergenerational mobility. Apparently my friendly ‘oops, you did it again’ emails don’t seem to have any impact. … Continue reading →

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The most sobering sentence I’ve read this week

Posted on January 8, 2010 by andrewleigh

From the NYT: “We’ve got to figure out how to break the cycle of poverty, and the way we’re doing it now isn’t working,” said Hank M. Bounds, the Mississippi commissioner of higher education and, until recently, the state superintendent … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics of Education, Economics of the Family, Inequality | 3 Comments

Look at the changes, not at the levels

Posted on December 14, 2009 by andrewleigh

A few people have asked me recently for my view on “The Spirit Level” by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which is apparently having some impact in policy circles. John Kay’s view in the FT comes closest to my own: … Continue reading →

Posted in Australian Politics, Health economics, Inequality, Macroeconomics | 9 Comments

How Socially Mobile are Conference Attendees?

Posted on December 9, 2009 by andrewleigh

At my intergenerational mobility conference last week, I asked all attendees: What percentile in the income distribution does your household now occupy? (1=lowest,50=middle, 100=highest) What percentile in the income distribution did your household occupy when you were aged 14? In … Continue reading →

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Social Mobility Conference

Posted on November 12, 2009 by andrewleigh

I still have a few spare spaces for my intergenerational mobility conference at ANU on Monday 30 November. The conference will now be opened by Terry Moran, the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. So if it’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Coming Events, Inequality | 4 Comments

Conference on Intergenerational Mobility

Posted on October 9, 2009 by andrewleigh

On Monday 30 November, I’m running a conference at ANU on ‘The Economics of Intergenerational Mobility’. This is an area I’ve been interested in since 2007, when I wrote what I’m pretty sure was the first paper estimating the intergenerational … Continue reading →

Posted in Development Economics, Econometrics, Economics of Education, Economics of the Family, Health economics, Inequality, Labour Economics, Tax | Comments Off on Conference on Intergenerational Mobility

Did Howard cut poverty? Absolutely (but not relatively)

Posted on September 4, 2009 by andrewleigh

Peter Siminski (who is coming to ANU for part of his sabbatical next year) has coauthored an interesting paper in the latest issue of the Australian Economic Review. Changes in Poverty Rates during the Howard Era (gated, alas) Joan R. … Continue reading →

Posted in Australian Politics, Inequality, Low Wage Work | 1 Comment

More Evidence on Cash 4 Class

Posted on July 20, 2009 by andrewleigh

A recent randomised evaluation from Wisconsin has potential application to the debate over Australian proposals to link school attendance to income support. Conditional Cash Penalties in Education: Evidence from the Learnfare Experiment (stable link, ungated link) by Thomas Dee Wisconsin’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics of Education, Inequality | 2 Comments

Inequality and Growth

Posted on July 5, 2009 by andrewleigh

I have a new paper out with Dan Andrews and Christopher Jencks, on the relationship between inequality and growth. We reach a finding that is pretty standard in this literature – when we restrict the sample to 1960-2000, more inequality … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality, Macroeconomics | Comments Off on Inequality and Growth

Educational Catchup Downunder

Posted on June 26, 2009 by andrewleigh

A wonderfully ambitious paper just published in the new Journal of Human Capital combines school enrollment data and demographic tables to estimate educational attainment rates for 74 countries over the period 1870-2010. Here’s the abstract. The Century of Education (published … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics of Education, Inequality | 3 Comments

Unified but Unequal

Posted on June 24, 2009 by andrewleigh

Christian Dustmann, Johannes Ludsteck, and Uta Schoenberg have a new paper out in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, dismissing the notion that Germany has stayed pretty equal over recent decades. Here’s their abstract and the key picture: Revisiting the German … Continue reading →

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Inequality Datasets

Posted on June 13, 2009 by andrewleigh

My former graduate school classmate, sociologist Andrew Clarkwest, has produced a nice set of inequality measures by race for each US state, using the 1970-2000 census. I offered to host them on my website, which prompted me to also draw … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality | 3 Comments

Schools That Transform

Posted on May 11, 2009 by andrewleigh

David Brooks reports on some surprisingly large impacts from a randomised trial of New York “Harlem Children’s Zone” schools. The effects are so big that I find it hard to imagine they’re readily replicable, but it’s tantalizing stuff. The fight … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics of Education, Inequality | 9 Comments

Do Smart Parents Raise Smart Kids?

Posted on April 29, 2009 by andrewleigh

Not surprisingly, the answer is yes. But we might also be interested in magnitudes. A new paper using German data finds a parent-child test score correlation of 0.45, which is bigger than the intergenerational earnings correlation in Germany (about 0.2, … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics of Education, Inequality | 5 Comments

Social Mobility and Statistical Immobility

Posted on April 9, 2009 by andrewleigh

(Crossposted to Core Economics) I typically find that there’s a great benefit in posting draft papers online, and getting feedback before the paper finally goes to the journal. But I’m also learning about possible disadvantages. In 2006, I wrote what … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality | 5 Comments

Stressed Out on Struggle Street

Posted on April 3, 2009 by andrewleigh

From this week’s Economist, some evidence that stress might help explain intergenerational cycles of poverty. The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have … Continue reading →

Posted in Health economics, Inequality | 6 Comments

What thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty…

Posted on May 1, 2008 by andrewleigh

I’ve recently completed two chapters for a forthcoming Oxford University Press Handbook on Economic Inequality. They’re rather long, but anyone who’s interested in a survey of the literature on top incomes, or health and inequality (coauthored with Christopher Jencks and Tim Smeeding), … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality | 7 Comments

Leisure Inequality

Posted on April 9, 2008 by andrewleigh

Economists spend a lot of time talking about money inequality, but here’s the flipside. The Increase in Leisure Inequality Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst This paper examines the changing allocation of time within the United States that has occurred between … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality, Low Wage Work | 1 Comment

Dreaming of inequality

Posted on April 8, 2008 by andrewleigh

Don Arthur at Club Troppo (the closest thing in Australia to a nineteenth-century debating salon) has a splendid post on inequality, shedding light on the simple but ferociously difficult question: how much is too much?

Posted in Inequality | 6 Comments

Moving up in America

Posted on February 20, 2008 by andrewleigh

A new Brookings Institution report highlights the role of education in social mobility. Key finding, from the NYT writeup: The study highlights the powerful role that college can have in helping people change their station in life. Someone born into … Continue reading →

Posted in Inequality | 3 Comments

Do neighbourhoods matter?

Posted on February 12, 2008 by andrewleigh

My AFR oped today looks at social inclusion and neighbourhood disadvantage. Full text over the fold.

Posted in Inequality, Low Wage Work | 14 Comments

Getting a bit fat around the middle?

Posted on February 8, 2008 by andrewleigh

In the AFR earlier this week, La Trobe Professor Don Harding predicted that when Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit rolls around, not one of the proposals will entail a spending cut. That won’t be true if they invite Fred Argy. In … Continue reading →

Posted in Australian Politics, Inequality | 11 Comments

Summer in Luxembourg?

Posted on February 3, 2008 by andrewleigh

The SPRC at UNSW and the Luxembourg Income Study are again offering a scholarship to fund cross-national research on inequality. Details below. The SPRC is coordinating a scholarship to enable people to attend the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)  workshop in … Continue reading →

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Who cares about inequality?

Posted on January 22, 2008 by andrewleigh

The Maxwell School has released its latest poll on Americans’ attitudes to inequality. As Norberto Bobbio once wrote, attitudes to inequality are the best way of gauging a person’s position on the left/right spectrum, and their poll strongly reinforces that.

Posted in Inequality, US Politics | 3 Comments