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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

  • Haley McAvay headshot

    Residential diversity in young adulthood and later life attitudes toward immigration
    Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

    Tuesday 3 February 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. LSE Sir Arthur Lewis Building LG.04.

    Speaker:
    Dr Haley McAvay, Associate Professor of Sociology, LSE Department of Sociology

    Inequalities in residential environments have received a lot of attention in understanding the appeal of anti-immigration parties across advanced democracies in recent years. This paper explores the long-term association between neighborhood context in adolescence and attitudes towards immigration later in life drawing on a cohort study from the UK (Next Steps) matched with census data. Drawing on the premises of the impressionable years hypothesis and contact theory, we posit that as a space of socialisation, the local area that one experienced in adolescence is influential to the development of immigration attitudes. Our findings suggest that ethnic diversity during one’s adolescence has a persistent association with attitudes even when adulthood individual characteristics and residential environment are taken into account. Specifically, we find that living in ethnically diverse areas in adolescence is associated with increased tolerance toward immigration up to three decades later.

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  • Keetie Roelen

    Examining poverty reduction and welfare through the lens of empathy and dignity
    Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

    Tuesday 10 February 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. LSE Centre Building 2.04.

    Speaker:
    Dr Keetie Roelen, Senior Research Fellow in Poverty and Social Protection and Co-Deputy Director at the Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD), Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS), Open University

    In this seminar, Keetie offers a critical interrogation of anti-poverty and welfare policies through the lens of empathy and dignity. Based on her book The Empathy Fix. Why Poverty Persists and How To Change It, she explores the double standards and widespread myths that underpin attitudes to poverty, and lead to responses that serve to police and punish the poor. Drawing on research and examples from around the world, Keetie unpacks notions of behavioural change, meritocracy, self-reliance within current anti-poverty and welfare policy, and what policy options may offer more empathetic and dignified alternatives.

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  • Kirsten Sehnbruch headshot

    Modern labour markets: an employment-capability framework for the future of work
    Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

    Tuesday 17 February 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. LSE Sir Arthur Lewis Building LG.04.

    Speaker:
    Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch, Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III

    On a theoretical level, the capability approach can be applied on three different ‘levels’: First, as a framework of thought, second, as a critique of other approaches to welfare evaluation, and third as a formula to make interpersonal comparisons of welfare (Robeyns, 2000). For Sen, their order of importance is precisely this ranking.

    Arguments about how the capability approach can serve to frame a debate on employment from these perspectives continues to be under-formulated. The literature that conceptualises aspects of employment is often fragmented and directed at specific topics such as collective agency (Bonvin, 2012; Leßmann, 2022) or job quality (e.g. Green, 2025 and Stephens 2023). The job quality literature, in addition, has mostly focused on operationalising interpersonal comparisons of employment conditions, but has not sufficiently engaged with the distributional questions associated with job quality.

    This theoretical paper therefore develops an employment-capability framework; relates it to other theoretical approaches to labour markets; and discusses how it can be used to undertake interpersonal comparisons.

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  • Mario D Molina headshot

    People reject unfairness but normalise inequality
    Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

    Tuesday 3 March 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. LSE Clement House 2.05.

    Speaker:
    Dr Mario D. Molina, Assistant Professor, Social Research and Public Policy programme, NYU Abu Dhabi

    Economic inequality is rising worldwide, yet it remains widely tolerated despite people's strong aversion to unfairness and rejection of excessive disparities. Why do people accept the very inequalities they claim to oppose? Existing accounts hold that inequality is acceptable when it results from fair processes and argue that tolerance of inequality reflects misinformation or limited awareness of the systemic inequities that produce it. We propose an alternative explanation: people use moral judgment to assess procedural fairness but rely on experienced inequality to set standards for acceptable disparities. We test this account in a large pre-registered online experiment ($N=3{,}335$) using a fully crossed factorial design that manipulated opportunity inequality, outcome inequality, and social position in a competitive game. The results reveal a stark dissociation: participants consistently deemed unequal opportunities unfair, yet their tolerance for disparities was largely unaffected by how opportunities were distributed. Instead, individuals normalized the level of inequality they personally experienced, adopting it as a baseline for acceptable outcomes, irrespective of procedural fairness.

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  • Clara Martinez Toledano headshot

    Private capital markets and inequality
    Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

    Tuesday 10 March 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. LSE Centre Building 2.04.

    Speaker:
    Dr Clara Martínez-Toledano, Assistant Professor of Financial Economics, Imperial College London; Wealth Distribution and Political Cleavages Coordinator, WID.world

    This paper studies the relationship between the growth in private capital markets and the rise in economic inequalities over the last two decades in the U.S. First, we document that the share of financing raised by early-stage companies from U.S. high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) tripled from 2004 to 2022. Second, exploiting both company- and state-level variation in exposure to the expanded federal capital gains tax exclusion on qualified small business stock (QSBS), we find that QSBS-eligible companies’ probability of staying private increased by 3.6 percentage points, and that the average income gap between HNWIs and other income earners increased by 7.2%. Third, we show that this rise in income concentration appears to have been driven by HNWIs’ excess returns on their early-stage investments relative to public stock market returns. Finally, using counterfactual simulations, we find that HNWIs’ excess returns on these investments accounted for 28% of the growth in the top 0.5% wealth share between 2010 and 2022.

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  • Hillary Vipond headshot

    Mapping the industrial revolution: a micro-level analysis of job creation and loss in Victorian Britain
    Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

    Tuesday 17 March 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. Vera Anstey Room, LSE Old Building.

    Speaker:
    Dr Hillary Vipond, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Transforming Economies team, Complexity Science Hub, Vienna and Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity

    This paper maps job creation and loss during Britain’s Second Industrial Revolution to examine how technological change reshaped access to opportunity. Using full-count census microdata from 1851 to 1911, I construct a new, task-level classification of occupation to track the emergence of new jobs and the decline of traditional work across industries and local labor markets. Because nineteenth-century technological change was not strongly skills-biased, access to new and emerging occupations may have been mediated primarily by family background, gender, or geographic proximity to firms adopting new technologies. Linking micro-level job dynamics to patterns of social mobility, the paper documents the distributional consequences of creative destruction.

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  • Annalena Oppel headshot

    The rising tide: floods as drivers of income and welfare inequality in South Africa
    Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

    Tuesday 24 March 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. LSE Centre Building 2.04.

    Speakers:
    Dr Annalena Oppel, Research Fellow, Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity, LSE
    Dr Enrico Nichelatti, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg

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  • Jeanne Bomare profile picture

    Death and taxes: inheritance tax planning and unexpected mortality
    Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

    Tuesday 31 March 2026, 12.30 to 1.30pm. In-person and online seminar. LSE Marshall Building 2.06.

    Speaker:
    Dr Jeanne Bomare, Research Officer, LSE III

    We use the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to identify the scale and mechanisms of inheritance tax planning in the United Kingdom. By providing an exogenous shock to mortality, the pandemic suddenly truncated the time available for anticipatory planning. Linking administrative inheritance tax returns to high-frequency mortality data, we compare the estates of individuals who died unexpectedly during the pandemic with those of observationally similar decedents from pre-pandemic years.

    We find that unexpected deaths are associated with significantly larger reported estates - increasing the average estate by approximately £350,000 - and a 5 percentage point rise in effective tax rates. Our results indicate that inheritance tax planning reduces effective liabilities by at least 55 percent, representing an annual revenue loss of £3-4.5 billion. We show that inter-vivos transfers, rather than within-estate portfolio restructuring, are the primary planning margin. These findings demonstrate that the ‘seven-year rule’ for gifts is a first-order determinant of the effective tax base and suggest that revenue-raising reforms must prioritize the treatment of lifetime transfers.

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Previous Inequalities Seminars