Inequalities Seminar Series
Tuesdays, 12.30 to 1.30pm
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 seminars are open and free to all.
Upcoming Inequalities Seminars
Spatial wealth inequality in the US: New methods, data and implications
Tuesday 29 September 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speaker:
Dr Joel Suss, Data Journalist, Financial Times and Visiting Fellow, LSE IIIVery little is known about how wealth and wealth inequality vary sub-nationally. We've developed a novel, widely applicable approach to measuring wealth inequality at local levels in the United States from 1960 onwards using machine learning and ensemble methods. Further innovations involve going from the regional to the neighbourhood level. We then use these estimates to describe variation in wealth and wealth inequality over time and place, and the impact this variation has had for a number of important outcomes.
The rulers: corporate power in the age of AI and the cloud
Tuesday 6 October 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speaker:
Dr Cecilia Rikap, Associate Professor in Economics and Head of Research, IIPP- UCLHow did we arrive at a world in which a handful of megacorporations from the United States -and to a lesser extent, from China- control the production and use of the technologies that define contemporary capitalism? This seminar presents a unique and empirically grounded theory of how corporate power is structured and exercised with a focus on how Amazon, Microsoft and Google control not only AI value chains but growing portions of global capitalism from their clouds. Control is not simply ceded to AI models, but to those who determine how the models are produced and sold. And these are, primarily, Amazon, Microsoft and Google through their clouds. On top of resulting in a more unequal society in terms of income and wealth, other forms of inequality spread, in particular, regarding knowledge and decision-making power.
The Real Living Wage: the anatomy of a social justice campaign
Tuesday 13 October 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speaker:
Professor Edmund Heery, Emeritus Professor of Employment Relations, Cardiff Business SchoolThis seminar will present original findings from a longitudinal study of the UK’s Real Living Wage, a voluntary standard promoted by Citizens UK which has been adopted by more than 22,000 employers since 2011. Three primary issues will be addressed: 1) the nature of the campaign to promote the Living Wage, including the methods used and the range of institutional actors who have participated; 2) the response of employers and the characteristics of employing organizations that have adopted the Living Wage; and 3) the redistributive and other outcomes of the campaign, including estimates of how many workers have gained materially and received an increase in pay. The session will conclude by suggesting what the emergence of campaigns of this kind tells us about the changing system of employment regulation in the UK.
Beyond the degree: the limits of meritocracy in elite public employment
Tuesday 20 October 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speaker:
Dr Malik Fervovic, Visiting Research Fellow, School of Government, Pontificia Universidad Católica de ChileCan higher education equalize opportunities across social classes, or does it instead reproduce existing inequalities? While research has documented "class ceilings" in elite private-sector organizations, we know much less about whether similar dynamics operate within public institutions formally committed to meritocracy. This paper examines an elite Chilean public institution responsible for regulating the national economy. Because recruitment and promotion are governed by transparent, merit-based procedures, it provides a particularly demanding test of whether higher education functions as a mechanism of equal opportunity. Drawing on a mixed-methods study combining a survey of 68 professionals and 33 in-depth interviews, the paper examines how educational credentials, social class, and gender shape recruitment and career progression. The findings show that formal meritocratic procedures coexist with informal mechanisms of advantage.
Gateways, funnels, and stackers: how people hide UK property ownership through offshore financial structures
Tuesday 27 October 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speaker:
Professor Kristin Surak, Professor of Political Sociology, Department of Sociology, LSEHow do wealthy individuals use offshore financial structures like shell companies to protect personal assets? And how is such offshore wealth structuring itself variably organized? Moving beyond conceptualizations of offshore as concerning only individual tax havens, this article investigates offshore wealth structuring as a fundamentally relational practice to supply the first systematic image of the patterns between two key layers of offshore structures within a specific asset class. We analyze the overseas entities that hold expensive residential properties in the UK to make three contributions to debates around offshore. Our findings supply a pioneering analysis of the scope, scale, and interstitial formations of the offshore structures that wealthy individuals use to hold personal property.
Pay a man to fish: subsidies, trade, and cooperation in the global commons
Tuesday 10 November 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speaker:
Aaron Berman, PhD Candidate in Economics, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMost contemporary environmental issues are global in scope, but international cooperation to address them has remained elusive. Against this backdrop, the World Trade Organization has just ratified a historic agreement to regulate industrial subsidies for fishing fleets, but several developing countries have resisted the agreement, citing a desire to industrialize their fishing sectors and extract resource rents in the way that developed countries have done historically. In this project, I estimate the potential gains from regulating economic activity in the global commons, tracing out both cross-country and intertemporal welfare trade-offs. I develop a model of trade policy that features standard terms-of-trade motives and a new non-pecuniary channel that arises when resource stocks are shared. I assemble a comprehensive geospatial dataset on fishing activity since 2010 and, exploiting exogenous variation in fishing locations created by ocean waves, provide evidence of meaningful cross-country productivity spillovers from harvesting activity. I then use my data and spillover estimates to simulate the effects and welfare incidence of a multilateral agreement to reduce fuel subsidies.
Kinship interlocks: how the intimate exchange of wealth, status, and power generates upper-class persistence
Tuesday 17 November 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speaker:
Dr Shay O'Brien, Postdoctoral Associate, James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, MITHow do some families manage to entrench themselves in the upper class for many generations while others do not? Bringing together economic sociology, political sociology, and stratification, I propose a new concept for the study of multigenerational persistence at the top of a stratified society: kinship interlocks. Kinship interlocks are portions of a kinship network that closely combine great wealth, status, and power. Just as board interlocks connect corporate elites through overlapping board memberships, kinship interlocks connect economic, social, and political elites through family ties. Using a mixed-methods analysis, I find that the intimate exchange of resources in kinship interlocks generates upper-class persistence via two primary mechanisms: it protects kin from economic, legal, and social risk, and it propels kin into higher strata. Processes of kin formation and intimate exchange are co-constitutive with systems of gender, sexuality, and race, such that the most durable portions of an upper class are especially heteronormative and racially dominant.
Why morally motivated public good provision can lead to polarisation and minimal contributions
Tuesday 24 November 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speaker:
Professor Karine Nyborg, Professor of Economics, University of OsloMoral obligations can be burdensome, possibly giving rise to dynamic social processes easing the burden. We show that in unequal societies relying on voluntary public good provision, social learning and social migration can gradually undermine individuals’ feeling of moral responsibility, while at the same time causing segregation and strong normative polarization. In the steady state, total voluntary contributions to public goods are minimal. Low-income individuals are completely egalitarian, while high-income individuals are completely libertarian; moreover, low- and high-income individuals do not interact socially. We also show, however, that if public goods are tax-funded and provided by the government, public good supply may reach its first-best level whereas no strong polarization needs arise.
People reject unfairness but normalise inequality
Tuesday 1 December 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speaker:
Dr Mario D. Molina, Assistant Professor, Social Research and Public Policy program, NYU Abu DhabiEconomic inequality remains widely tolerated despite people's strong aversion to unequal opportunities to get ahead in society. Existing accounts attribute this general acceptance to limited public awareness of inequality. We propose an alternative explanation: people apply moral judgment to evaluate opportunity inequality but anchor their standards for acceptable outcome inequality to the disparities they encounter in their social environment. Across two pre-registered experiments evaluating real-world income disparities, we independently manipulated opportunity inequality, outcome inequality, and social position. Results reveal a stark dissociation: participants consistently judged uneven playing fields as unfair and accordingly attributed success to structural rather than meritocratic factors, yet their tolerance for outcome inequality was largely unaffected by how those opportunities were distributed. Instead, individuals accepted prevailing hierarchies and normalized the extent of economic inequality they experienced, adopting it as a baseline for acceptable distributions - regardless of whether the economic outcomes arose from a level or tilted playing field.
Multigenerational mobility and long-run inequality
Tuesday 8 December 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online public event. LSE campus (room TBC).Speakers:
Professor Ravi Kanbur , T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics, and Professor of Economics, Cornell University & Visiting Professor, LSE III
Dr Yonatan Berman, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Department of Political Economy, King's College London & Visiting Fellow, LSE IIIIntergenerational mobility is typically summarized by a parent-child elasticity, but this two-generation statistic is insufficient to characterize the long-run transmission of economic advantage. We propose a parsimonious extension of the canonical AR(1) model that adds a permanent lineage component and, more broadly, a new criterion for evaluating mobility models: whether they predict inequality and persistence in generations not used for estimation.
Using linked US censuses from 1850 to 1940, we construct millions of father-son pairs spanning up to five generations. Standard autoregressive models fit short-run mobility patterns but imply that dynastic persistence should largely disappear and substantially underpredict the subsequent rise in occupational-score inequality. In contrast, the lineage-effects model closely reproduces both the persistence of occupational status and the Gini observed in 1920 and 1940 out of sample. The distinction is economically consequential: persistent differences across lineages are substantially more important for long-run inequality and immobility than the conventional parent-child elasticity. Our results reframe multigenerational mobility as primarily a problem of persistent heterogeneity across lineages, and provide a framework for assessing the long-run distributional consequences of inherited advantage.
Previous Inequalities Seminars
Catch up on all of our past seminars here.