Economics 350, Winter 2023: PRIVATE KEY

 

---

Week by Week Topics

1. Inequality and Social Mobility: Surprising Facts and Measures That Challenge Conventional Claims
2. Skills, Schools, and Learning-by-Doing
3. Preferences: Preference and Habit Formation
4. Tasks, Occupations, and Skills
5. Labor Supply and Work Incentives
6. Income Dynamics
7. Family Influence: Marriage, Genes, Parenting, and Credit Constraints
8. Neighborhood and Peer Effects
9. Monopoly and Monopsony as Sources of Inequality
10. Impacts of Public Policies

---

Topics Covered

Inequality, Social Mobility (within and across generations)

1. Measures (wealth, income, earnings, health, employment and labor supply)
   1. The claims, the evidence and the quality of evidence
   2. Units of measurement (persons, households, extended families?)
   3. Transfers, welfare dependence, social transfer programs, and the growth of the welfare state
2. Roles of:
   1. Abilities, skills, and prices; skill prices vs. rates of return
   2. Credit market constraints: Lending and borrowing
3. Income Dynamics within the Lifecycle
4. Life Cycle Skill and Preference Formation
   1. Parenting and production of traits, skills, and capacities
   2. Traditional human capital models (OJT; schooling)
   3. Learning by doing
5. Tasks and Skills
   1. Definition of tasks and relationship with skills
   2. Hedonic models, sorting, and endogenous tasks
6. Labor supply, incentives, and public policy
   1. Growth of the welfare state
   2. Disincentive to work
7. Families
   1. Household models
   2. Marriage markets
   3. Fertility
8. Markets and Technology
   1. Monopsony and monopoly: impacts and inequality
   2. Technology: AI, innovation, robots, and skill-biased technical change
9. Neighborhood and Peer Effects: Is zip code destiny? Does geography matter for life outcomes?
   1. Sorting, peer effects, and neighborhoods

---

Reports by Week

Week 1A, January 3, 2023: Inequality and Social Mobility: Some Surprising Facts and Basic Measures That Challenge Conventional Claims

• Bruce Meyer and Thomas Coleman
• Joint Economic Committee. 2019. “Measuring Income Concentration: A Guide for the Confused.” United States Congress. Last accessed March 3, 2022.
  • Measuring Income Concentration: A Guide for the Confused, Joint Economic Committee (2019)
• Auten, Gerald, and David Splinter. 2019b. “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Unpublished manuscript, Office of Tax Analysis, U.S. Treasury Department.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 and Zucman, Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016, 131(2): 519-578 [Appendix & data webpage].
• Fitzgerald, John, and Robert Moffitt. 2022. “The Supplemental Expenditure Poverty Measure: A New Method of Measuring Poverty.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity BPEA Conference, Washington, DC, March 24-25, 2022.
  • Meyer, Bruce. “Comment on Fitzgerald and Moffitt.”
• Slides: Three Narratives on Income Inequality: Importance of Good Data Analysis, Methodology, and Theory, Coleman (2022)