Economics 341, Fall 2024: Origins, Persistence, and Consequences of Inequality

Reading List

Instructors: James J. Heckman and Sadegh Eshaghnia

If you experience problems with this website, please contact Jennifer Pachon.

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We recommend that everyone check out Our World in Data and its articles on inequality trends over time and across countries. Papers with “**” should be read for reading responses.

1. Overview

   • **Atkinson, Anthony B.  (2015). “Setting the Scene,” in Inequality : What Can Be Done?, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press).
   • **Hasell, Joe, Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Pablo Arriagada. 2023a. “Economic Inequality.” Our World in Data, last visited 9/13/2024.
   • Hasell, Joe, Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Pablo Arriagada.. 2023b. “Poverty.” Our World in Data, last visited 9/13/2024.
   • **Noah, Timothy. 2012. The great divergence: America’s growing inequality crisis and what we can do about it. Array ed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
   • **Roser, Max, Pablo Arriagada, Joe Hasell, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. 2023. “Economic Growth.” Our World in Data, last visited 9/13/2024.
   • Measuring Inequality
     • **Cowell, Frank. (2016). “Inequality and Poverty Measures,” in The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy, Matthew D. Adler, and Marc Fleurbaey, eds. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).
     • **Sitthiyot, Thitithep, and Kanyarat Holasut. (2020). “A simple method for measuring inequality,” Palgrave Communications, 6(1): 112.
     • Trapeznikova, Ija. 2019. Measuring Income Inequality. IZA World of Labor No. 462. (Bonn, Germany).
     • Adler, Matthew D. 2019. Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
     • Litchfield, Julie A. 1999. “Inequality: Methods and Tools,” Prepared for the World Bank Poverty website. Washington DC: World Bank.
     • Ray, Debraj. 1998. Development economics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
     • Cowell, Frank A. (2011). Measuring inequality, 3 ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).

2. Positive and Normative Framework

   • **Okun, Arthur M. . (2015). Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press).
   • **Roemer, John E., and Alain Trannoy. (2015). “Equality of Opportunity,” in Handbook of Income Distribution, Anthony B. Atkinson, and François Bourguignon, eds. (Amsterdam: Elsevier).
   • **Singer, Peter. (1999). “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” in The New York Times Magazine, (New York, NY, Section 6, page 60. September 5, 1999).
   • Feldman, Fred, and Brad Skow. (2020). “Desert,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta, ed. (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University).
   • Jencks, Christopher. (2002). “Does Inequality Matter?” Daedalus, Winter: 49-65.
   • Lamont, Julian, and Christi Favor. (2017). “Distributive Justice,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta, ed. (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University).
   • **Lecture notes:
     • **Durlauf, Steven. (2020). “Utilitarianism, Welfarism, and Capabilities,” Lecture notes, Economics 349: Inequality and Social Mobility, (Department of Economics, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL).
     • **Durlauf, Steven. (2020). “Equality of Opportunity, Responsibility, and Desert,” Lecture notes, Economics 349: Inequality and Mobility, (Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL).

3. Social Mobility

   • **Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan. (2017). “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, No. 23618.
   • **Chetty, Raj, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang. (2017). “The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940,” Science, 356(6336): 398-406.
   • **Jäntti, Markus, and Stephen P. Jenkins. (2015). “Income Mobility,” in Handbook of Income Distribution, Anthony B. Atkinson, and François Bourguignon, eds. (Elsevier). Chapter 10, pp. 807-935.
   • **Landersø, Rasmus, and James J. Heckman. (2017). “The Scandinavian Fantasy: The Sources of Intergenerational Mobility in Denmark and the US,” The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 119(1): 178-230.
   • Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez. (2014). “Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4): 1553-1623.
   • Eshaghnia, Sadegh, and James J. Heckman. (2023). “Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality: Maternal Endowments, Investments, and Birth Outcomes,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, No. 31761.
   • Reeves, Richard V., and Eleanor Krause. (2018). “Raj Chetty in 14 Charts: Big Findings on Opportunity and Mobility We Should All Know,” in Social Mobility Memos: Commentary, (Washington, DC: Brookings).
   • **Watch the video made by The Economist on “Why it’s Harder to Earn More Than Your Parents.”

4. Education and Skills

   • **Autor, David H. (2014). “Skills, education, and the rise of earnings inequality among the “other 99 percent”,” Science, 344(6186): 843-851.
   • **Bloom, Nicholas, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb. (2020). “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?,” American Economic Review, 110(4): 1104-1144.
   • **Heckman, James J. (2008). “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Economic Inquiry, 46(3): 289-324.
   • **Jones, Chad. (2018). “New Ideas About New Ideas: Paul Romer, Nobel Laureate,” in VOXeu/CEPR. October 12, 2018.
   • **Reardon, Sean F. (2013). “No Rich Child Left Behind,” in The New York Times, April 27, 2013.
   • **Reardon, Sean F. (2019). “Educational Opportunity in Early and Middle Childhood: Using Full Population Administrative Data to Study Variation by Place and Age,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 5(2): 40-68.
   • Badger, Emily, and Kevin Quealy. (2017). “How Effective is Your School District? A New Measure Shows Where Students Learn the Most,” in The New York Times, (New York, NY).
   • Bond, Timothy N., and Kevin Lang. (2018). “The Black–White Education Scaled Test-Score Gap in Grades K-7,” Journal of Human Resources, 53(4): 891-917.
   • Rich, Mokoto, Amanda Cox, and Matthew Bloch. (2016). “Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares,” in The New York Times, April 29, 2016.
   • Ritchie, Hannah, Veronika Samborska, Natasha Ahuja, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser. (2023). “Global Education.” Our World in Data.
   • Roser, Max, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. 2016. “Education Spending.” Our World in Data.
   • Rubinstein, Yona, and Yoram Weiss. (2006). “Post Schooling Wage Growth: Investment, Search and Learning,” in Handbook of the Economics of Education, E. Hanushek, and F. Welch, eds. (Amsterdam: Elsevier). Chapter 1, pp. 1-67.
   • Webber, Douglas A. (2016). “Are college costs worth it? How ability, major, and debt affect the returns to schooling,” Economics of Education Review, 53: 296-310.

5. Family and Childhood Investments

   • **Carneiro, Pedro, and James J. Heckman. (2003). “Human Capital Policy,” in Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?, James J. Heckman, and Alan B. Krueger, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
   • **Doepke, Matthias, Giuseppe Sorrenti, and Fabrizio Zilibotti. (2019). “The Economics of Parenting.” Annual Review of Economics, 11(1):55-84.
   • **Heckman, James J. (2011). “The Economics of Inequality: The Value of Early Childhood Education,” American Educator, 35(1): 31-35.
   • **Heckman, James J. and Stefano Mosso. (2014). “The Economics of Human Development and Social Mobility,” Annual Review of Economics, 6(1):689-733.
   • **Mogstad, Magne, and Gaute Torsvik. (2023). “Family background, neighborhoods, and intergenerational mobility,” in Handbook of the Economics of the Family, Shelly Lundberg, and Alessandra Voena, eds. (North-Holland).
   • Almond, Douglas, and Janet Currie. (2011). “Killing Me Softly: The Fetal Origins Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25(3): 153–172.
   • Eshaghnia, Sadegh, and James J. Heckman. (2023). “Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality: Maternal Endowments, Investments, and Birth Outcomes,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, No. 31761.
   • García, Jorge Luis, James J. Heckman, and Victor Ronda. (2023). “The Lasting Effects of Early-Childhood Education on Promoting the Skills and Social Mobility of Disadvantaged African Americans and Their Children,” Journal of Political Economy, 131(6): 1477-1506.

6. Race, Discrimination, and Criminal Justice

   • **Agan, Amanda, and Sonja Starr. (2017). “Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A Field Experiment,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(1): 191-235.
   • **Altonji, Joseph G., and Rebecca M. Blank. (1999). “Race and gender in the labor market,” in Handbook of Labor Economics, Orley Ashenfelter, and David Card, eds. (Amsterdam: Elsevier).
   • **Arnold, David, Will Dobbie, and Peter Hull. (2022). “Measuring Racial Discrimination in Bail Decisions,” American Economic Review, 112(9): 2992–3038.
   • **Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. (2004). “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” American Economic Review, 94(4): 991–1013.
   • **Heckman, James J. (2011). “The American Family in Black & White: A Post-Racial Strategy for Improving Skills to Promote Equality.” Daedalus, 140(2):70-89.
   • Bayer, Patrick, and Kerwin Kofi Charles. (2018). “Divergent Paths: A New Perspective on Earnings Differences Between Black and White Men Since 1940.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(3):1459-1501.
   • Cawley, John, James Heckman, and Edward Vytlacil. (1999). “Meritocracy in America: Wages Within and Across Occupations,” Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, 38(3): 250-296.
   • Neal, Derek. (2006). “Why Has Black–White Skill Convergence Stopped?” In Handbook of the Economics of Education, edited by E. Hanushek and F. Welch, 511-576. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
   • Pager, Devah, Bart Bonikowski, and Bruce Western. (2009). “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment,” American Sociological Review, 74(5): 777-799.

7. Neighborhood Sorting and Segregation

   • **Card, David, Alexandre Mas, and Jesse Rothstein. (2008). “Tipping and the Dynamics of Segregation,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1): 177-218.
   • **Chetty, Raj, and Nathaniel Hendren. (2018). “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(3):1107-1162.
   • **Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R Jones, and Sonya R Porter. (2020). “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: an Intergenerational Perspective.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(2):711-783.
   • **Eshaghnia, Sadegh. (2023). “Is Zip Code Destiny?,” Unpublished manuscript, The University of Chicago, Department of Economics.
   • Chetty, Raj, and Nathaniel Hendren. (2018). “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II: County-Level Estimates.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(3):1163-1228.
   • Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz. (2016). “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment.” American Economic Review, 106(4):855-902.
   • Eshaghnia, Sadegh, James J. Heckman, and Goya Razavi. (2023). “Pricing Neighborhoods,” National Bureau of Economic Research NBER Working Paper Series, No. 31371.

8. Unions and Minimum Wage

   • **Card, David, Ana Rute Cardoso, Joerg Heining, and Patrick Kline. (2018). “Firms and Labor Market Inequality: Evidence and Some Theory,” Journal of Labor Economics, 36(S1): S13-S70.
   • **Dynarski, Susan. (2018). “Fresh Proof that Strong Unions Help Reduce Income Inequality,” in The New York Times, Economic View, July 6, 2018.
   • **Farber, Henry S, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu. (2021). “Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 136(3): 1325-1385.
   • **Song, Jae, David J Price, Fatih Guvenen, Nicholas Bloom, and Till von Wachter. (2018). “Firming Up Inequality,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(1): 1-50.
   • Krueger, Alan B., and Alexandre Mas. (2004). “Strikes, Scabs, and Tread Separations: Labor Strife and the Production of Defective Bridgestone/Firestone Tires,” Journal of Political Economy, 112(2): 253-289.

9. Globalization and Technological Changes

   • **Acemoglu, Daron and David Autor. (2011). “Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings,” In: Orley Ashenfelter and David Card, (eds.), Handbook of Labor Economics, Volume 4, Part B, Chapter 12. Amsterdam: Elsevier. pp. 1043-1171.
   • **Autor, David H. (2015). “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3): 3–30.
   • **Badger, Emily. (2017). “What Happens When the Richest U.S. Cities Turn to the World?” in The New York Times, The Upshot, December 22, 2017.
   • **Ravallion, Martin. (2018). “Inequality and Globalization: A Review Essay,” Journal of Economic Literature, 56(2): 620–642.
   • **Rodrik, Dani. (1998). “Has Globalization Gone Too Far?” Challenge, 41(2): 81-94.
   • Acemoglu, Daron, and Pascual Restrepo. (2020). “Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets,” Journal of Political Economy, 128(6): 2188-2244.

10. Top One Percent and Superstar Effect

    • **Alvaredo, Facundo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez. (2013). “The Top 1 Percent in International and Historical Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(3): 3–20.
    • **Kaplan, Steven N., and Joshua Rauh. (2013). “It’s the Market: The Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(3): 35–56.
    • **Rosen, Sherwin. (1981). “The Economics of Superstars,” The American Economic Review, 71(5): 845-858.
    • **Zucman, Gabriel. (2019). “Global Wealth Inequality,” Annual Review of Economics, 11: 109-138.
    • Auten, Gerald and David Splinter. (2019). “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” Unpublished manuscript, Office of Tax Analysis, U.S. Treasury Department.
    • Saez, Emmanuel, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman. (2016). “Economic Growth in the United States: A Tale of Two Countries,” The Washington Center for Equitable Growth Inequality and Mobility, December 6, 2016.

11. Politics of Inequality

    • **Alesina, Alberto, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva. (2022). “Immigration and Redistribution,” The Review of Economic Studies, 90(1): 1-39.
    • **Bonica, Adam, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. (2013). “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(3): 103–124.
    • **Martin, Gregory J., and Ali Yurukoglu. (2017). “Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization,” American Economic Review, 107(9): 2565–2599.
    • **Porter, Eduardo, and Karl Russell. (2018). “Migrants are on the Rise Around the World and Myths About Them are Shaping Attitudes,” in The New York Times, June 20, 2018.
    • **Skocpol, Theda, and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez. (2016). “The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism,” Perspectives on Politics, 14(3): 681-699.

12. Other Reading Materials

    • Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. (2015). “The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(1): 3–28.
    • Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. (2020). Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
    • Gramm, Phil, Robert Ekelund, and John Early. (2022). The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated).
    • Piketty, Thomas. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press).
    • Scanlon, Thomas. (2018). Why does inequality matter? Array ed. (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press).
    • Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2012). The price of Inequality. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co.).

13. James J. Heckman Reading List

    1. November 20, 2024: Race, Discrimination, and Criminal Justice

       • Donohue, John J., and James Heckman. (1991). “Continuous Versus Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks.” Journal of Economic Literature, 29(4): 1603-1643.
         • Handout
       • Heckman, James J. (2011). “The American Family in Black & White: A Post-Racial Strategy for Improving Skills to Promote Equality.” Daedalus, 140(2):70-89.
         • Handout
       • Heckman, James J. and Brook S. Payner. (1989). “Determining the Impact of Federal Antidiscrimination Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks: A Study of South Carolina,” American Economic Review, 79(1): 138-177.
         • Handout
       • Young, S. Stanley, Warren Kindzierski, and David Randall. (2024). “Keeping Count of Government Science: Zombie Psychology, Implicit Bias Theory, and the Implicit Association Test,” National Association of Scholars, Shifting Sands: Unsound Science and Unsafe Regulation, No. 4.
         • Handout
       • García, Jorge Luis, and James J. Heckman. (2023). “Parenting Promotes Social Mobility Within and Across Generations,” Annual Review of Economics, 15: 349-388.
         • Handout
       • García, Jorge Luis, James J. Heckman, and Victor Ronda. (2023). “The Lasting Effects of Early-Childhood Education on Promoting the Skills and Social Mobility of Disadvantaged African Americans and Their Children,” Journal of Political Economy, 131(6): 1477-1506.
         • Handout
       • Alba, Richard. (2024). “The unappreciated centrality of ethnoracially mixed Americans to the nation’s demographic future,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(47): e2415070121.
         • Handout
       • Lecture Notes:
         • Sources of Racial and Ethnic Gaps and Sources of Improvement
         • Some Background on Factors Promoting Black-White Differences

    2. December 2, 2024: Inequality and Social Mobility

       • Loury, Glenn. (2024). “Which Black Lives Matter?,” Substack entry on The Glenn Show. November 24, 2024. Last accessed November 25, 2024. Link.
       • Donohue, John J., III, James J. Heckman, and Petra E. Todd. (2002). “The Schooling of Southern Blacks: The Roles of Legal Activism and Private Philanthropy, 1910–1960,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(1): 225-268.
       • Heckman, James, Anne Layne-Farrar, and Petra Todd. (1996). “Human Capital Pricing Equations with an Application to Estimating the Effect of Schooling Quality on Earnings,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, 78(4): 562-610.
       • Chetty, Raj, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca and Jimmy Narang. (2017). “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940,” Science, 356(6336): 398-406.
       • Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R Jones, and Sonya R Porter. (2020). “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(2): 711-783.
       • Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, and Nick Turner. (2014). “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility,” American Economic Review, 104(5): 141-147.
       • Guvenen, Fatih, and Greg Kaplan. 2017. “Top Income Inequality in the 21st Century: Some Cautionary Notes.” Working Paper 23321. National Bureau of Economic Research.
       • Caspi, Avshalom, Renate M. Houts, Daniel W. Belsky, Honalee Harrington, Sean Hogan, Sandhya Ramrakha, Richie Poulton, and Terrie E. Moffitt. (2016). “Childhood forecasting of a small segment of the population with large economic burden,” Nature Human Behaviour, 1(1): 0005.
       • Kautz, Tim, James J.  Heckman, Ron Diris, Bas ter Weel, and Lex Borghans. (2014). “Fostering and Measuring Skills: Improving Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills to Promote Lifetime Success,” OECD Education Working Papers, No. 110.
       • Fraga, Mario F., Esteban Ballestar, Maria F. Paz, Santiago Ropero, Fernando Setien, Maria L. Ballestar, Damia Heine-Suñer, Juan C. Cigudosa, Miguel Urioste, Javier Benitez, Manuel Boix-Chornet, Abel Sanchez-Aguilera, Charlotte Ling, Emma Carlsson, Pernille Poulsen, Allan Vaag, Zarko Stephan, Tim D. Spector, Yue-Zhong Wu, Christoph Plass, and Manel Esteller. (2005). “Epigenetic differences arise during the lifetime of monozygotic twins.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (30): 10604-10609.
       • Heckman, James, and Rasmus Landersø. (2022). “Lessons for Americans from Denmark about inequality and social mobility,” Labour Economics, 77: 101999.