Measuring and conceptualising wealth inequality, including trends over time

Intergenerational Transfers, Wealth and Gender in Britain - Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 25 May 2021

Speakers: Professor Brian Nolan and Dr Juan Palomino 

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira 

This talk investigated the impact of intergenerational wealth transfers on wealth levels and inequality, exploiting rich household survey data. The speakers analysed patterns of intergenerational transfer receipt by gender, and assessed the extent to which differences in the scale and nature of these receipts contribute to the gender wealth gap. 

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Faces of Inequality: a mixed methods approach to multidimensional inequalities - Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 18 May 2021

Speaker: Dr Paul Segal 

Chair: Dr Tahnee Ooms 

This talk presented a new mixed methods approach to measuring and understanding multidimensional inequality, applied to new data for Mexico City. Quantitative and qualitative dimensions of inequality were incorporated, integrating the concerns of both economists and sociologists.

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Homoploutia: Top Labor and Capital Incomes in the United States, 1950-2020 - Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 4 May 2021

Speaker: Dr Yonatan Berman 

Chair: Dr Nora Waitkus 

Homoploutia describes the situation in which the same people are rich in the space of capital and labor income. In this talk, survey and administrative data was combined to document the evolution of homoploutia in the United States since 1950, finding that the increase in labor income inequality contributed to the rising homoploutia, which in turn explains 20% of the increase in interpersonal income inequality since 1986.

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Wealth Inequality Across the Globe 

Thursday 18 February 2021

Speakers: Professor André J. Caetano, Professor Li Chunling, Sventlana Mareeva, Professor Celi Scalon, and Professor Kwang-Yeong Shin 

Chair: Professor Mike Savage 

This event introduced a special issue of The Journal of Chinese Sociology, which showcased new analyses of wealth inequality and their implications for social stratification and inequality in comparative perspective. Chaired by Mike Savage, the contributions ranged across Russia, China, South Korea, Brazil, as well as Europe and North America, to reflect on the size of the wealth gap, its dimensions and its significance for remaking traditional class divides.

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Why do people stay poor? - Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 29 September 2020

Speaker: Professor Oriana Bandiera 

Chair: Dr Tahnee Ooms 

There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes differences in fundamentals, such as ability, talent or motivation. The other, poverty traps view, differences in opportunities stemming from differences in wealth.

This study exploits a large-scale, randomized asset transfer and panel data on 6000 households over an 11 year period to test between these two views. The data supports the poverty traps view - identifying a threshold level of initial assets above which households accumulate assets, take on better occupations and grow out of poverty. The reverse happens for those below the threshold. The findings imply that big push policies which transform job opportunities for the poor might represent a permanent solution to the global mass poverty problem.

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Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It 

Friday 08 November 2019

Speaker: Heather Boushey 

Chair: Dr Tahnee Ooms 

Do we have to choose between equality and prosperity? Many think that reducing economic inequality would require such heavy-handed interference with market forces that it would stifle economic growth. Heather Boushey, one of Washington’s most influential economic voices, insisted nothing could be further from the truth. Presenting cutting-edge economics with journalistic verve, she showed how rising inequality has become a drag on growth and an impediment to a competitive United States marketplace for employers and employees alike.

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Switching Focus: whose responsibility to improve disabled people's employment and pay? 

Wednesday 28 November 2018

Speakers: Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson DBE, Lord Chris Holmes MBE, David Isaac CBE, and Liz Sayce

Chair: Dr Tania Burchardt 

This event marked the launch of a report that set an agenda to scale up inclusive employment practice through policies that focus on the demand side: incentivising and supporting employers. Decades of focus on the supply side – requiring or supporting disabled individuals to move towards work – have left the UK with stubborn disability employment and pay gaps. A different approach is needed.

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The Challenge of Richness? Rethinking the Giant of Poverty

Tuesday 20 February 2018

Speakers: Dr Tania Burchardt, Amy Feneck, Dr Sam Friedman, and Dr Luna Glucksberg

Chair: Professor Mike Savage

The economic and political power of the richest in our society has dramatically increased since 1942. 75 years on since his report, the panel discussed whether Beveridge’s concern with poverty now needs to be extended to include a concern with richness.

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Intersecting Inequalities and the Sustainable Development Goals: insights from Brazil - Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 09 May 2017

Speaker: Professor Naila Kabeer

Chair: Dr Aaron Reeves

This talk presented findings from new research supported by the III using national data from Brazil to explore how groups at the intersection of race, class, gender and spatial inequalities fared in relation to indicators of poverty, labor market engagement and well-being that have been highlighted by the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. The analysis covers the period 2004 to 2013 when income inequality was declining in Brazil. It therefore allows us to investigate how socially marginalized groups in the country experienced this overall decline in inequality and to explore some of the explanations as to why and how.

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From Ideas to Practice: new frontiers in research (III Annual Conference 2017)

Speakers: Professor Naila Kabeer, Dr Abigail McKnight, Dr Will Bartlett, and Dr Will Bartlett 

Chair: Alan Hirsch

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Gender and Everyday Life (Inequality in the 21st Century Conference) 

Tuesday 26 May 2015

Speakers: Professor Diane Perrons, Professor Stephanie Seguino, Dr Lisa McKenzie, Professor Thomas Piketty, and Professor Naila Kabeer

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st century highlights the magnitude of contemporary inequality, how it has come about, why it matters, and what might be done about it. Introducing a feminist perspective enhances his analysis by not only pointing to the gendered composition of contemporary inequality but by introducing an inter-disciplinary perspective capable of examining the multiple ways in which inequalities are naturalised, legitimated and experienced in everyday life.

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Taxing Hidden Wealth: The Consequences of U.S. Enforcement Initiatives on Evasive Foreign Accounts (2019)

Authors: Niels Johannesen, Patrick Langetieg, Daniel Reck, Max Risch, Joel Slemrod

Summary: In 2008, the IRS initiated efforts to curb the use of offshore accounts to evade taxes. This paper uses administrative microdata to examine the impact of enforcement efforts on taxpayers’ reporting of offshore accounts and income. We find that enforcement caused approximately 50,000 individuals to disclose offshore accounts with a combined value of about $100 billion. Most disclosures happened outside offshore voluntary disclosure programs, by individuals who never admitted prior noncompliance. Disclosed accounts were concentrated in countries often characterized as tax havens. Enforcement-driven disclosures increased annual reported capital income by $2-$4 billion, corresponding to $0.6-$1.2 billion in additional tax revenue.

Experience of multiple disadvantage among Roma, Gypsy and Traveller children in England and Wales (2018)

Authors: Tania Burchardt, Polina Obolenskaya, Polly Vizard and Mario Battaglini 

Keywords: Roma, Gypsy, Traveller, poverty, deprivation, inclusion, integration, ‘data exclusion’ 

Summary: Roma, Gypsy and Traveller children across Europe experience high levels of disadvantage and have repeatedly been identified as a priority in European Commission policy documents, yet they are often missing or invisible in the large-scale statistical analyses of children at risk of poverty and deprivation that drive policy development and monitoring. In this paper we argue that population Censuses, and other administrative sources, many of which already record Roma ethnicity, are under-utilised as a source of robust and comparable data, allowing the scale, intensity and multi-dimensionality of the challenges facing Roma, Gypsy and Traveller children to be investigated and tracked. We illustrate this through the descriptive analysis of secure microdata from the 2011 Census of England and Wales, which included a pre-coded category for ‘Gypsy or Irish Traveller’ for the first time, and to which we add children identified as Roma. Disadvantage in each of four dimensions - housing, household economic activity, education and health - are examined in turn before computing a multiple deprivation count. Nearly a quarter of Roma, Gypsy and Traveller children in England and Wales aged under 19 are deprived on 3 or more dimensions, compared to just two per cent of other children. And conversely, only a small minority (15%) of Roma, Gypsy and Traveller children are not deprived in any dimension, compared to the majority (67%) of all other children. We conclude that data scarcity should no longer be used as an excuse for a lack of effective policymaking: it is both desirable and feasible to exploit Census data, as a step towards tackling the data deficit, and that the results can improve the design of child poverty and Roma, Gypsy and Traveller integration policies.

Inequality, advantage and the capability approach (2017)

Authors: Tania Burchardt, Rod Hick 

Summary: Inequality has acquired a newfound prominence in academic and political debate. While scholars working with the capability approach (CA) have succeeded in influencing the conceptualisation and measurement of poverty, which is increasingly understood in multidimensional terms, recent scholarship on inequality focusses overwhelmingly on economic forms of inequality, and especially on inequalities in income and wealth. In this paper we outline how the conceptual framework of the CA (focusing on ends rather than means, multidimensionality, and recognising the value of freedoms as well as attained functionings) has the potential to enrich the study of distributional inequality through offering a rationale for why inequality matters, exploring the association between different forms of inequality, and providing an analysis of power. But applying the CA in the context of advantage exacerbates some existing challenges to the approach (defining a capability list, and the non-observability of capabilities) and brings some fresh ones (especially insensitivity at the top of the distribution). We recommend a stronger and clearer distinction between concepts and measures. Capability inequality is a more appropriate and potentially revealing conceptual apparatus, but economic resources are likely to remain a crucial metric for understanding distributional inequality for the forseeable future.

Gender Equality, Economic Growth, and Women’s Agency (2015)

Author: Naila Kabeer

Keywords: agency, empowerment, development, growth, inequality, gender

Summary: Macroeconometric studies generally find fairly robust evidence that gender equality has a positive impact on economic growth, but reverse findings relating to the impact of economic growth on gender equality are far less consistent. The high level of aggregation at which these studies are carried out makes it difficult to ascertain the causal pathways that might explain this asymmetry in impacts. Using a feminist institutional framework, this contribution explores studies carried out at lower levels of analysis for insights into the pathways likely to be driving these two sets of relationships and a possible explanation for their asymmetry.

The changing distribution of individual incomes in the UK before and after the recession (2015)

Authors: Eleni Karagiannaki and Lucinda Platt

Keywords: income, Great Recession, income distribution, United Kingdom 

Summary: Using pooled data from the Family Resources Survey, this paper addresses the question of which groups gained and which lost in terms of their individual income between 2005-2008 and 2009-20012.

Falling behind, getting ahead: the changing structure of inequality in the UK, 2007-2013 (2015)

Authors: John Hills, Jack Cunliffe, Polina Obolenskaya, Eleni Karagiannaki

Keywords: qualifications, employment, wealth, economic crisis, United Kingdom 

Summary: This report contains a detailed examination of the qualifications, employment, pay, incomes and wealth of different groups since the economic crisis. It shows that the legacy of the crisis has not fallen evenly. Across a range of outcomes, people in their twenties have lost most, despite higher qualifications than any earlier generation.

Assessing the Impact of Social Mobilization: Nijera Kori and the Construction of Collective Capabilities in Rural Bangladesh (2014)

Authors: Naila Kabeer and Munshi Sulaiman

Keywords: impact assessment, microfinance, social mobilization, collective capabilities, NGOs, Bangladesh

Summary: While Bangladesh has a large and active development non-governmental organization sector, it has undergone a steady process of homogenization, turning from its early focus on social mobilization to a market-oriented service provision model, dominated by microfinance. This article explores the impacts associated with Nijera Kori, one of the few organizations that has retained a commitment to social mobilization, seeking to strengthen the collective capabilities of the poor men and women to protest injustice and demand their rights. The article uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to measure the political, economic and social impacts of the organization and to unpack the processes by which the observed changes have occurred.

Paid Work, Women's Empowerment and Inclusive Growth  (2013)

Authors: Naila Kabeer, Ragui Assaad, Akosua Darkwah, Simeen Mahmud, Hania Sholkamy, Sakiba Tasneem, Dzodzi Tsikata, and Munshi Sulaiman 

Keywords: gender, growth, education, employment, labour, productivity, health, children, well-being, family, women

Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is There a Win-Win?  (2013)

Authors: Naial Kabeer and Luisa Natali 

Keywords: gender, economic growth, women, education, employment, health, well-being, development, cross-country regression analysis

The Relative Role of Socio-Economic Factors in Explaining the Changing Distribution of Wealth in the US and the UK  (2013)

Authors: Frank Cowell, Eleni Karagiannaki and Abigail McKnight

Keywords: household wealth, wealth inequality, debt, housing assets, age-wealth profiles, decomposition

Summary: The US and the UK experienced substantial increases in net wealth over the period 1994/95—2005/06, largely driven by house price booms in each country. The distribution of these gains across households led to a slight increase in wealth inequality in the US but a substantial fall in inequality in the UK. This paper uses a decomposition technique to examine the extent to which changes in households’ socio-economic characteristics explain changes in wealth holdings and wealth inequality. In both countries it finds that changes in household characteristics had an equalising effect on wealth inequality; moderating the increase in the US and accounting for over one-third of the fall in UK inequality.

Accounting for cross country differences in wealth inequality  (2013)

Authors: Frank Cowell, Eleni Karagiannaki and Abigail McKnight

Keywords: household wealth, wealth inequality, debt, housing assets, educational loans, age-wealth profiles, decomposition

Summary: This paper adopts a counterfactual decomposition analysis to analyse cross-country differences in the size of household wealth and levels of household wealth inequality. The findings of the paper suggest that the biggest share of cross-country differences is not due to differences in the distribution of household demographic and economic characteristics but rather reflect strong unobserved country effects.

Women's economic empowerment and inclusive growth: labour markets and enterprise development  (2012) 

Author: Naila Kabeer

Keywords: women, gender, empowerment, growth, inclusive growth, labour markets, enterprise, development

The Wealth Effect: How Parental Wealth and own Asset-Holdings Predict Future Advantage  in Wealth in the UK: Distribution, Accumulation, and Policy  (2013)

Authors: Abigail McKnight and Eleni Karagiannaki 

Keywords: intergenerational mobility, asset effects, parental wealth, education, employment, earnings, health outcomes 

Summary: This chapter explores the relationship between social mobility and wealth-/asset-holdings. In terms of social mobility, it looks at both intra-generational mobility by looking at own-asset-holdings during early adulthood on later outcomes for employment, earnings, general health, and psychological well-being, and intergenerational mobility by looking at the impact of parental wealth on children’s adult outcomes (age 25) covering education, employment, and earnings. The results suggest strong relationships between parental wealth—particularly housing wealth—and children’s educational outcomes, and—partly through these but also through other routes—on to earnings and employment. Early asset-holding—perhaps the product of the inheritance or lifetime transfer patterns investigated in the previous chapter—is also associated with better later employment prospects and higher earnings, as well as with better later general health and psychological well-being (although patterns vary between men and women).

Faces of Inequality: a mixed methods approach to multidimensional inequalities

Ingrid Bleynat and Paul Segal  
Working paper 68 - Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice

This paper presents a new mixed methods approach to measuring and understanding multidimensional inequalities, and applies it to new data for Mexico City. We incorporate quantitative and qualitative dimensions of inequality, integrating the concerns of both economists and sociologists. The method combines standard quantitative income gradients with two new ways of conceptualizing qualitative inequalities that relate to lived experiences, all based on the same underlying income distribution. First, we introduce the method of qualitative income gradients, or what we call inequalities of lived experience. These compare qualitative experiences in fields such as work, or health and education services, across the entire income distribution. Second, we describe lived experiences of inequality, which are experiences of social hierarchy, stigma, or domination, including those associated with categorical inequalities of gender or race. This portrayal of inequality combines the representativeness of quantitative approaches with the depth and nuance of qualitative analyses of lived experience and social relations.

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Investigating the gender wealth gap across occupational classes

Nora Waitkus and Lara Minkus
Working paper 56 - Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice

This study examines the role of occupational class in the Gender Wealth Gap (GWG). Despite rising interest in gender differences in wealth, the central role of occupations in restricting and enabling its accumulation has received less scrutiny thus far. Drawing on the German Socio-economic Panel, we employ quantile regressions and decomposition techniques. We find explanatory power of occupational class for the gender wealth gap, which operates despite accounting for other labour-market-relevant parameters, such as income, tenure, and full-time work experience at all points of the wealth distribution. Wealth gaps by gender vary between and within occupational classes. Particularly, women's under-representation among the self-employed and over-representation among socio-cultural professions explain the GWG. Our study thus adds another dimension of stratification - occupational class - to the discussion of the gendered distribution of wealth.

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Bringing the social structure back in: a rents-based approach to inequality

Celia Lessa Kerstenetzky
Working paper 50 - Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice

Motivated by a perceived lacuna in theoretical discussions on income inequality, this paper explores an approach based on the place in that inequality of economic rents. Although widely recognized as a subject to be considered in relation to inequality, rents are still failing to receive a conceptually and theoretically unified treatment. In fact, although accepted as an element in the distribution branch of economics, economic rents have been subject to a somewhat incomplete treatment, especially when it comes to understanding the origin in wealth ownership. This blind spot invites cross-disciplinary collaboration as a means of elucidation. So, in this paper, I review and systematize scattered conceptual and theoretical contributions on the subject drawn from the literatures of both economics and sociology. Briefly, while economics delineates the market phenomenon giving rise to rents, sociology sheds light on the influence of background social structure on both the supply and demand blades of the ‘market scissor’. This is to some extent reminiscent of Marx’s class struggle analysis; but Marx’s original view is amplified by the sociological perspectives I review here, as the latter identify and conceptualize rents earned by labour in addition to those earned by capital. Two ideas that sprang from my reading of the sociological perspectives should be placed at the very core of a rents-based approach to inequalities. The first is that the normal functioning of markets does not make economic rents disappear; the second is that all earnings are relative, so that rents, including negative rents, are a vital part of everyone’s remuneration in contemporary capitalist economies. An outline of a rents-based theory of inequality is proposed and normative and policy consequences of undertaking this move are hinted at.

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Inequality, living standards and growth: two centuries of economic development in Mexico

Ingrid Bleynat, Amílcar Challú, and Paul Segal
Working paper 46 - Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice

Historical wage and incomes data are informative both as normative measures of living standards, and as indicators of patterns of economic development. We show that, given limited historical data, median incomes are most appropriate for measuring welfare and inequality, while urban unskilled wages can be used to test dualist models of development. We present a new dataset including both series in Mexico from 1800 to 2015 and find that both have historically failed to keep up with aggregate growth: per worker GDP is now over eight times higher than in the nineteenth century, while unskilled urban real wages are only 2.2 times higher, and median incomes only 2.0 times. From the perspective of inequality and social welfare, our findings confirm that there is no automatic positive relationship between economic growth and rising living standards for the majority. From the perspective of development, we argue that these findings are consistent with a dual economy model based on Lewis’s assumption of a reserve army of labour, and explain why Kuznets's predicted decline in inequality has not occurred.

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Inequality as Entitlements over Labour

Paul Segal
Working paper 43 - Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice

The modern study of economic inequality is based on the distribution of entitlements over goods and services. But social commentators at least since Rousseau have been concerned with a different aspect of economic inequality: that it implies that one person is entitled to command another person for their own personal ends. I call this inequality as entitlements over labour. I propose to measure entitlements over labour by calculating the extent to which top income groups can afford to buy the labour of others for the purpose of their personal consumption. Unlike standard inequality measures, this measure is not welfarist, but instead has its normative basis in relations of domination, hierarchy and social status between people. I estimate entitlements over labour in three high-inequality and two low-inequality countries and argue that inequality as entitlements over labour is socially and politically salient, capturing a side of inequality neglected by standard measures.

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Hidden wealth

Neil Cummins
Working paper 39 - Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice

Group rights and gender justice: exploring tensions within an indigenous community in India

Naila Kabeer, Nivedita Narain, Varnica Arora and Vinitika Lal
Working paper 33 - Global Economies of Care

Where is the Middle Class? Inequality,Gender and the Shape of the UpperTail from 60 million English Death and Probate Records, 1892-2016

Neil Cummins
Working paper 30 - Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice

This paper analyses a newly constructed individual level dataset of every English death andprobate from 1892-2016. The estimated top wealth shares match closely existing estimates.However, this analysis clearly shows that the 20th century's `Great Equalization' of wealthstalled in mid-century. The probate rate, which captures the proportion of English with anysignificant wealth at death rose from 10% in the 1890s to 40% by 1950 and has stagnated to2016. Despite the large declines in the wealth share of the top 1%, from 73% to 20%, themedian English person died with almost nothing throughout. All changes in inequality after1950 involve a reshuffling of wealth within the top 30%. Further, I find that a log-lineardistribution fits the empirical data better than a Pareto power law. Finally, I show that the topwealth shares are increasingly and systematically male as one ascends in wealth, 1892-1992, but this has equalized over the 20th century.

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Intersecting Inequalities and the Sustainable Development Goals: insights from Brazil

Naila Kabeer and Ricardo Santos
Working paper 14 - Global Economies of Care