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Inequality in an Equal Society

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posted on 2024-11-08, 17:23 authored by Laura HarveyLaura Harvey, Jochen Mierau, James Rockey

A society in which everybody of a given age has the same income will exhibit substantial income and wealth inequality. We use this idea to empirically quantify inter-cohort inequality – the share of observed inequality attributable to life-cycle profiles of income and wealth – using data on male earnings and household wealth. We document that recent increases in income and wealth inequality in the USA and other developed countries are larger than observed rates would suggest due to favourable demographics. That is, while demographic change played a substantial role in the dynamics of income and wealth inequality until 1990, the stark increase in inequality in the USA and elsewhere ever since is despite not because of demographic change. Moreover, we show that there is important variation across countries in the level and trends in the extent of inequality that is due to lifecycle effects, and that taking this into account gives a more nuanced view of cross-country comparisons. No description supplied

History

School

  • Loughborough Business School

Published in

Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics

Volume

86

Issue

4

Pages

871-904

Publisher

Wiley

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access article published by Informa UK and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acceptance date

2024-04-08

Publication date

2024-05-07

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

0305-9049

eISSN

1468-0084

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Laura Harvey. Deposit date: 7 May 2024

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