About the series
The Inequalities Seminar Series at the International Inequalities Institute is a venue for scholars from LSE and beyond to present their innovative work on social and economic inequality. The series builds on the recently renewed interest of the social sciences for issues of income and wealth inequality. It is also a place for exploring fresh perspectives on the various structural and cultural processes that underlie the formation of inequality broadly defined.
The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and organized by Dr Fabien Accominotti and Dr Aaron Reeves. It is part funded through Prof Mike Savage's ESRC professorial fellowship funds.
All talks are held on Tuesdays from 12.15-1.45pm in Tower 2, 9th Floor, Room 9.04. Buffet lunch will be served at 12pm. The seminars are open and free to all.
Redefining Support for Redistribution: preferences for reducing economic inequality in the US and Sweden
Speaker: Prof Leslie McCall (Northwestern University)
Tues 29th Nov, TW2, 9.05, 12.15-13.45
In contrast to studies of the multiple determinants and implications of inequality, research into the potential array of solutions to the problem of inequality is narrower in scope. There are two main strands: the study of tax and social policies (social redistribution) and pay-compression policies that address inequalities in the labour market (market distribution). The attitudinal literature is narrower still, focusing only on support for social redistribution. Prof Leslie McCall will present an expanded definition of preferences for redistribution that includes the second category and new questions on the GSS and ISSP that permit a careful comparison of support for the two kinds of policies in the United States and Sweden. Among Americans, it is found that support for redistribution increases from under 50 percent for the traditional definition to two-thirds for the expanded definition and that Swedes and Americans have nearly identical levels of support for market redistribution. The empirical evidence is inconsistent with key tenets of American exceptionalism and points toward the theoretical importance of incorporating market inequalities into discussions of the politics of inequality and redistribution.
Leslie McCall is Professor of Sociology and Political Science, and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. She studies public opinion about inequality and related economic and policy issues as well as trends in actual earnings and family income inequality. She is the author of The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution (2013) and Complex Inequality: Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy (2001).
The Strength of Weak Performance: a relational theory of executive pay
Speaker: Prof Thomas A. DiPrete (Columbia)
Tues 8th Nov, TW2 9.05, 12.15-13.45
Using the most comprehensive data on executive compensation peer groups yet analysed, Thomas DiPrete demonstrated that compensation peer groups tend to be biased upwards, and showed how the pattern of bias arises through the relational structure underlying benchmarking processes. He provided evidence that compensation peer group bias produces higher levels of executive compensation.
Thomas A. DiPrete is Giddings Professor of Sociology, co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, and a faculty member of the Columbia Population Research Center. His current interests focus on social inequality as it unfolds over the life course.
The Organizational Production of Earnings Inequalities
Speaker: Prof Donald Tomaskovic-Devey (UMASS)
Tues 25th Oct, TW2, 9.04, 12.15-13.45
Organisations raise capital, hire, produce, sell and distribute surplus, generating the initial distributions of income from which all other income inequalities follow. But what drives workplace inequality levels and trends? In this presentation, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey will introduce the idea of organisations as income distribution devices, followed by a broad descriptive analysis of workplace earnings inequalities levels and trends from the early 1990s to the present for ten countries. The key lesson is that inequality levels and trends vary greatly between institutional contexts. He will follow with a more in-depth, casual analysis of what drives within and between workplace earnings inequalities in Germany.
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey studies the processes that generate workplace inequality. He has projects on the impact of financialization upon U.S. income distribution, workplace desegregation and equal opportunity, network models of labor market structure, and relational inequality as a theoretical and empirical project. His long-term agenda is to work with others to move the social science of inequality to a more fully relational and organizational stance.
Download slides (pdf)
Download video recording or watch below:
Top Incomes and the Gender Divide
Speakers: Prof Alessandra Casarico (Bocconi) and Dr Sarah Voitchovsky (University of Melbourne)
Tues 27th September, TW2 9.05, 12.15-13.45
In the recent research on top incomes, there has been little discussion of gender. How many of the top 1 and 10% are women? A great deal is known about gender differentials in earnings, but how far does this carry over into the distribution of total incomes, bringing self-employment and capital income into the picture? In this seminar, Prof Alessandra Casarico and Dr Sarah Voitchovsky presented their investigation of the gender divide at the top of the income distribution using tax record data for a sample of 8 countries with individual taxation. Read the corresponding Working Paper here.
