Related papers: Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistributio…
A country's mix of products predicts its subsequent pattern of diversification and economic growth. But does this product mix also predict income inequality? Here we combine methods from econometrics, network science, and economic…
It is commonly believed that patterns of social ties affect individuals' economic status. Here, we translate this concept into an operational definition at the network level, which allows us to infer the economic wellbeing of individuals…
This paper is part of the Global Income Dynamics Project cross-country comparison of earnings inequality, volatility, and mobility. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure…
How much does luck matter to a criminal defendant in a jury trial? We use rich data on jury selection to causally estimate how parties who are randomly assigned a less favorable jury (as proxied by whether their attorneys exhaust their…
This paper considers how the effect of job displacement varies across different individuals. In particular, our interest centers on features of the distribution of the individual-level effect of job displacement. Identifying features of…
The distribution of household income is a central concern of modern economic policy due to its strong influence on life quality. Yet, non-expert audiences are unaware of the relationship between these two factors. To effectively communicate…
Inequality is an inherent part of our lives: we see it in the distribution of incomes, talents, resources, and citations, amongst many others. Its intensity varies across different environments: from relatively evenly distributed ones, to…
Understanding the statistical dynamics of growth and inequality is a fundamental challenge to ecology and society. Recent analyses of wealth and income dynamics in contemporary societies show that economic inequality is very dynamic and…
We propose a controlled simulation within a competitive sum-zero environment as a proxy for disaggregating components of success. Given a simulation of the Risk board game, we consider (a) Talent to be one of three rule-based strategies…
Predictive models for identifying at-risk students early can help teaching staff direct resources to better support them, but there is a growing concern about the fairness of algorithmic systems in education. Predictive models may…
Fair machine learning (ML) methods help identify and mitigate the risk that algorithms encode or automate social injustices. Algorithmic approaches alone cannot resolve structural inequalities, but they can support socio-technical decision…
We study repeated task assignment as an instrument for providing effort incentives. Unlike traditional incentive instruments, assignment of a task both determines who produces and provides incentives, and incentives for one worker spill…
Scholars of social stratification often study exposures that shape life outcomes. But some outcomes (such as wage) only exist for some people (such as those who are employed). We show how a common practice -- dropping cases with…
Redistribution of resources within a group as a method to reduce wealth inequality is a current area of debate. The evolutionary path to or away from wealth sharing is also a subject of active research. In order to investigate effects and…
One way to make decisions under uncertainty is to select an optimal option from a possible range of options, by maximizing the expected utilities derived from a probability model. However, under severe uncertainty, identifying precise…
Using results from neurobiology on perceptual decision making and value-based decision making, the problem of decision making between lotteries is reformulated in an abstract space where uncertain prospects are mapped to corresponding…
Eradicating extreme poverty and inequality are the key leverage points to achieve the seventeen Sustainable Development goals. Yet, the reduction in extreme poverty and inequality are vulnerable to shocks such as the pandemic and climate…
This paper studies politically feasible policy solutions to inequities in local public goods provision. I focus in particular on the entwined issues of high property taxes, geographic income disparities, and inequalities in public education…
Income and wealth allocation are foundational components of how economies operate. These are complex distributions, and it is hard to get a real sense for their dynamics using simplifications like average or median. One metric that…
In this paper, we consider the problem of fair division of indivisible goods when the allocation of goods impacts society. Specifically, we introduce a second valuation function for each agent, determining the social impact of allocating a…