Inequality,Redistribution, and the Financial Crisis: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts for Austria

In this paper, we provide novel findings regarding the distributional effects of the global financial and economic crisis and how redistribution operated during this time, using detailed data for Austria. We construct distributional national accounts for the period 2004–2016 by combining survey data, tabulated tax data, and detailed national accounts data. The comprehensive data set allows us to analyze the distribution of macroeconomic income growth across the income distribution and to explore the evolution of income inequality over time. Our results suggest that as the distribution of growth changed over time, this had considerable repercussions for inequality, which started to decline at the very beginning of the economic and financial crisis, but increased again after 2012. We find that capital income largely determined both the level and the dynamics of income inequality. Government spending was found to play a key role for redistributive effects across the income distribution. In particular, in-kind transfers redistributed pre-tax income to a large extent. Our results show further that individuals with lower educational levels and younger individuals faced negative growth in pre-tax income over the years and also benefited considerably from redistribution.     

Trust and attitudes toward income inequality: Does individualism matter?

In the last decade authors have increasingly examined the role of two cultural traits – trust and individualism – on a variety of economic outcomes ranging from gendered attitudes to entrepreneurship, human capital accumulation, and economic development. While both have positive effects, recent literature suggests that the effects of trust are often conditional on other variables, and this aspect has been neglected in the literature. Indeed, a recent paper found that with respect to gendered attitudes, there are important interactions between the traits of trust and individualism. Building on this foundation we explore how views of trust and individualism interact to affect attitudes about income inequality. Our results show that while views regarding social trust generally positively affect the desire for income equality, this effect is strengthened in the presence of high individualism. Alternatively stated, distrust in highly individualistic environments leads to a greater desire for income differences (inequality). Our result highlights the important role played by market-based price and profit incentives in fostering economic activity and exchange in larger, impersonal extended orders where interpersonal trust and reputational effects are generally absent (in contrast to personal, small group exchange). Our results are robust to a variety of techniques to establish identification and account for sample selection and omitted variable bias.     

Wealth effects,IS-LM stability and the efficacy of economic policies

This paper considers the efficacy of macroeconomic policies in an extended Cebula-Wang IS-LM framework integrating wealth effects. We argue that an increase in money stock need not lead to a contraction of national income and bond-financed fiscal policy magnifies the positive impact on national income. In addition, money-financed fincal policy may have any effect on the level of income.     

TOP INCOMES AND NATIONAL SAVINGS

The relationship between income inequality and national savings is theoretically ambiguous, and past empirical studies have delivered mixed results. We revisit the question using a newly available source of data on inequality: the income share of the richest 10 percent and the richest 1 percent. Combining this with historical data on national savings rates, we are able to investigate the relationship for 11 developed countries over the period 1921–2002. We find no consistent relationship between lagged top income shares and current savings rates, and our standard errors are small enough that we are able to reject more than modest effects in either direction. We view this as suggesting that inequality at the top end of the distribution is not a major driver of national savings rates.     

Local flexibility in wage setting: evidence from the Norwegian local public sector

The public sectors in the Scandinavian countries have been prominent examples of centralized wage-setting systems. In Norway, more room for local flexibility was implemented by a wage frame system introduced in 1990 in which the national wage scale system merely works like a minimum wage system. We analyze the effect of this reform using a unique database where we can track employees and their local government over time and explore the consequences of controlling for fixed individual effects and fixed employer effects. We find that the wage dispersion increased across local governments after 1990, and that wages to some extent became more responsive to local government income, monopsony power and other local government characteristics after the reform. However, the numerical effects of the reform are estimated to be quite small.     

国民收入分配效率对通货膨胀的影响——基于1978～2007年时间序列数据的分析

运用计量经济模型,通过对现金净投放量、居民收入、通货膨胀率和国内生产总值四者之间的相互关系进行研究,在比较和分析了居民收入对现金净投放量的反应速度、CPI指数对现金净投放量的反应速度的基础上,发现整体居民收入增加时间点与物价上涨时间点之间存在一定时差,从而论证了国民收入分配效率对通货膨胀的影响。建议通过居民财富分配结构、国民收入分配结构的调整和政府干预机制的建立,来提高国民收入的分配效率,从而抵减通货膨胀的不利影响。     

Consumer sentiment and countercyclical fiscal policies

We re‐explore the consequences of some popular countercyclical intervention rules in a simple Keynesian‐type macroeconomic model in which the dynamics of consumer sentiment and business cycles are intertwined. We find that fiscal policy does not only have a direct effect on national income via the well‐known Keynesian multiplier process but also an indirect effect by affecting consumer sentiment. The good news is that the indirect effect may amplify the direct effect and therefore increases a policy‐maker’s impact on national income. However, the bad news is that due to the interactions between the business cycle and the evolution of consumer sentiment, the stabilization of national income is an intricate matter.     

Inflation and the Income Share of the Rich: Evidence for 14 OECD Countries

This paper examines the distributional implications of inflation on top income shares in 14 advanced economies using data over the period 1920–2016. We use local projections to analyze how top income shares respond to an inflation shock, and panel regressions in which all variables are defined as 5-year averages to examine the impact of inflation on the position of the top-one-percent in the long run. Our findings suggest that inflation reduces the share of national income held by the top 1 percent. Furthermore, we find that inflation shocks and long-run inflation have similar effects on top income shares.     

Minimum wages in an automating economy

We explore the suitability of the minimum wage as a policy instrument for reducing emerging income inequality created by new technologies. For this, we implement a binding minimum wage in a task-based framework, in which tasks are conducted by machines, low-skill, and high-skill workers. In this framework, an increasing minimum wage reduces the inequality between the low-skill wage and the other factor prices, whereas the share of income of low-skill workers in the national income is nonincreasing. Then, we analyze the impact of an automating economy along the extensive and intensive margins. In a setting with a minimum wage, it can be shown that automation at the extensive margin and the creation of new, labor-intensive tasks do not increase the aggregate output in general, as the displacement of low-skill workers counteracts the positive effects of cost-savings. Finally, we highlight a potential trade-off between less inequality of the factor prices and greater inequality of the income distribution when a minimum wage is introduced into an automating economy.     

Is there the threshold effect of cigarette price on smoking prevalence? A cross-country panel data analysis

This article shows new cross-country evidences by empirically investigating the joint effects of cigarette price levels and joining the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) on smoking prevalence in 74 countries over the period of 2000, 2003, 2005 and 2006. We assessed cigarette price elasticity for three national income levels using different databases on cigarette price from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), demographic and socioeconomic country characteristics from the World Bank and adjusted smoking prevalence rates published by various yearly WHO reports on the global tobacco epidemic from 2000 to 2010. A panel threshold regression was used to capture the nonlinear effects that cigarette prices on smoking prevalence at the three national income levels endogenously determined by estimation. Our findings supported the evidence that joining the WHO FCTC would have a positive effect on reducing cross-country smoking prevalence, especially among countries with low- and medium-income levels. Moreover, some simulated results show that a price hike of 10% would reduce smoking prevalence in countries with national income levels equal to or less than US$1900 and by 7.2% in countries with national income levels between US$1900 and US$2510 more than those with national income levels that are higher than US$2510.     

Political stability,corruption and trust in politicians

In this article we develop a dynamic model where an endogenous evolution of trust impacts a politician's choice for bribe-taking and tax re-distribution. The politician obtains utility from net income that comes from his wage income, tax embezzlements and bribe-taking, and he also has incentives for tax re-distribution. The higher the tax embezzlements and the more bribes the politician takes the lower his citizens' trust and the less likely will he be re-elected. We support the evolution of trust with an econometric investigation.We analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions, and find that withholding taxes and taking bribes may be complements or substitutes for a politician, depending on the politician's incentives for tax re-distribution. Without these incentives, tax embezzlement and bribe taking are necessarily substitutes. With sufficiently strong incentives, we find re-distribution and bribe-taking may become complements. Complements implies that the politician, at least partly, increases bribe-taking because this allows him to increase re-distribution, which aids his additional motives for tax re-distribution.Based on comparative statics at steady state we also find that the higher the politician's wage the lower the bribe-taking and the higher the trust; stronger social capital leads to less bribe-taking and higher levels of trust; improvements in electoral accountability induce a decrease in bribing while trust increases.     

Did support for economic and political reforms increase during the post‐communist transition,and if so,why?

We study the dynamics of individual support for changes in the economic and political system, using a unique dataset for 12 transition economies over the period 1991–2004. We document that support for transition was initially lower in the CIS countries and that there has been a converging trend in the support for reforms between the CIS and the Baltic and Central and Eastern European countries. We suggest several explanations for the initial divergence and the post‐98 convergence in support for transition between these three groups of countries, and show that economic growth, declining income inequality and improving quality of governance have contributed to increase the support for transition. In addition, we find that increased support for the market economy and democracy in the CIS is accompanied by a larger increase in trust towards the political institutions. Our results also confirm the implications of Aghion et al. ( 2010 )'s model of a negative correlation between trust and the demand for government regulation.     

Beyond the income effect of international trade on ethnic wars in Africa

We use detailed information on the location of agricultural and mining production to approximate international trade for different ethnic groups in order to study its impact on ethnic conflicts in Africa between 1993 and 2010. The goal is to go beyond the income effects of trade to study the residual effects of globalization on conflicts. We find that once we control for income but also for a wide variety of different factors in conflicts (using political variables and fixed effects), the international trade by ethnic groups has a pacific impact on conflicts. While this peaceful impact of trade is mainly found in the trade in agricultural products, it does not have a significant impact on the international trade in mining products. Finally, we propose an original two-step analysis showing that exports significantly reduce conflicts by affecting time-varying national characteristics. We interpret this result as an indication that globalization in Africa has participated in the formation of new national identities with peaceful effects between ethnic groups.     

Foreign direct investment,international trade,and firm heterogeneity

We present an asymmetric model with firm heterogeneity and foreign direct investment (FDI) from a developed country to a developing country. We found that the successful entry firms could be sorted from highest to lowest according to productivity as reimport firms, FDI firms, export firms, and domestic firms. We also found that FDI decreases (increases) the gross national income of the developed (developing) country, but it can either increase or decrease the world income according to the level of the relative propensity to spend. In addition, we demonstrated that FDI influences welfare through variations in average price, national income, and the number of types of goods.     

Does the relationship between income and child health differ across income groups? Evidence from India

This study explores the relationship between child health and socioeconomic status (health-income gradient) using the Indian Human Development Survey-II (2011-12) for children up to 5 years of age. Unlike previous studies our empirical analysis allows the gradient to vary across different income intervals using linear and cubic spline regressions. We use objective measure of child health - height-for-age Z-scores and find that an increase in income, on an average leads to reduction in prevalence of stunting. We also find differential effect of income on health across the income distribution with no effect of income on child health for very poor households. Further we explore underlying factors explaining the gradient and find that maternal health, housing quality, sanitation, non-infectious environment, media exposure to women and a safe neighbourhood are transmission channels that affect child health and together they explain almost 40% of the overall income effect. One of the major implication of our findings is that any policy to increase income of poor households should be complemented with a health policy designed specifically towards children as poor households are less likely to allocate additional income to child health.     

Trust,ability‐to‐pay,and charitable giving

In the literature on privately provided public goods, altruism has been motivated by what contributions can accomplish (public goods philanthropy), by the pleasure of giving (warm‐glow philanthropy), or by the desire to personally make a difference (impact philanthropy). Underlying these motives is the idea that individuals trust that their donations reach their goal. We revisit these models but allow for distrust in the institutional structures involved. An important result we derive is that trust considerations determine whether crowding out is less or more than complete, and we thus open up possibilities in terms of the extent of crowding out not currently available. We also model socially motivated philanthropy when income‐heterogeneous donors take trust and ability‐to‐pay into account. With ability‐to‐pay in social motivation, an important result we obtain is that low‐income donors may contribute more than high‐income donors (in both absolute and percentage‐of‐income terms), giving a potential theoretical foundation to the frequently observed “U‐shaped” pattern of giving.     

Structural change in the Australian electricity industry during the 1990s and the effect on household income distribution: A macro–micro approach

The Australian electricity industry experienced significant structural change during the 1990s mainly as a result of microeconomic reform. We analyse the effects of the structural change on the distribution of household income using a macro–micro approach. Our work shows that, nationwide, all income deciles experience higher real incomes in the order of 2%. Our results show that a previously state-owned monopoly industry can experience significant structural change while generating significant improvements in household real income without leading to significantly adverse impacts on national or regional income inequality. It suggests that policy makers in advanced economies should seriously consider such reforms given that they may generate large economic benefits with rather small economic costs.     

对“幸福—收入之谜”的一个解答

“幸福—收入之谜或悖论”是指当国家变得更富裕时,平均幸福水平并未随之提高。本文构建了一个规范的经济学理论模型,在个人理性选择和社会福利最大化的假定下研究人们的幸福问题,从而将幸福经济学整合到主流经济学中来。该模型同时考虑了收入和非收入因素,将心理学和经济学中的攀比理论和“忽视变量”理论的基本思想统一起来,在现代经济学中最为基本的帕累托最优标准和个人自利性假设下,探讨了幸福—收入悖论问题并给出了相应的解决方案。研究表明,存在一个与非物质初始禀赋正相关的临界收入水平,当收入尚未达到这个临界水平之前,增加收入能够提高社会的幸福度;一旦达到或超过这个临界收入水平,增加收入反而会降低总体幸福水平,导致帕累托无效的配置结果。因此,随着社会收入水平的提高,政府应当提高非物质需要方面的公共支出,以提高整个社会的幸福度。我们的理论结果也表明了重视社会公平、减少贫富差距过大的重要性,否则人们会由于自己收入相对过少,导致个体幸福度下降,从而导致社会福利下降。     

Redistributive choices and increasing income inequality: experimental evidence for income as a signal of deservingness

We explore the relation between redistribution choices, source of income, and pre-redistribution inequality. Previous studies find that when income is earned through work there is less support for redistribution than when income is determined by luck. Using a lab experiment, we vary both the income-generating process (luck vs. performance) and the level of inequality (low vs. high). We find that an increase in inequality has less impact on redistribution choices when income is earned through performance than when income results from luck. This result is likely explained by individuals using income differences as a heuristic to infer relative deservingness. If people believe income inequality increases as a result of performance rather than luck, then they are likely to believe the poor deserve to stay poor and the rich deserve to stay rich.     

Aggregation effects on price and expenditure elasticities in a quadratic almost ideal demand system

Abstract.  While it is well known that demand elasticities calculated at the macro level will in general differ from those calculated at the micro level because of aggregation effects, there remain the questions of how large the effects are and how they vary with the degree of inequality in the income distribution. We explore these questions with models based on a quadratic version of the Almost Ideal Demand System. We investigate the elasticity differences theoretically and then calibrate the models and generate numerical results, using income data for seven countries with widely different distributions. The aggregation effects are found generally to be rather small, even with highly unequal income distributions.