COVID-19 has been a tragedy for California. More than 4 million Californians have contracted the disease, and over 64,000 have died from it. And beyond the cost of illness and death, the pandemic and the state’s actions to contain it have devastated California’s economy. Low-income and...

Many developing countries are plagued by persistent inequality in income distribution. While a growing body of economic-demographic literature emphasizes differential fertility channel, this paper investigates differential child mortality - differences in child mortality across income groups -...

In his 2014 book, Thomas Piketty argues that wealth inequality is sharply increasing in r-g and refers to rg as ‘the central contradiction of capitalist economics', where r is asset returns and g is real income growth. To assess whether inequality is increasing in the (r-g)-gap this paper: 1)...

Credit affects individuals' perceptions and experiences of inequality. Having access to credit enables those in lower- and middle-income groups to consume an array of products and services that they otherwise would not be able to afford, thereby taking the edge off discontent. Citizens with...

In this world of plenty, almost half of the world's six billion people live on two dollars a day or less and the number living on less than one dollar a day has increased over the past fifteen years (World Bank 2000). Between one third and one half suffer undernutrition due to insufficient...

This Article examines property law’s effect on economic inequality, particularly centered on Thomas Piketty’s findings in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty finds that when the rate of return on capital is greater than economic growth, capital concentrates among the wealthy,...

In this article, the author uses a version of the neoclassical growth model with overlapping generations of individuals to investigate the effect of aging on wealth inequality. When an economy’s population becomes older—that is, when the proportion of individuals 65 years of age...

Luigi Pasinetti’s work has deeply affected modern economic theory. His papers on the Cambridge Capital Controversy are world renowned. But he has made many other contributions to the economic debates of the last half century, offering not only detailed criticisms of mainstream economic theory,...

Much of the recent interest in the relationship between growth and distribution has focused on advanced economies and neglected issues of development and structural transformation. The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to this gap by arguing that, even in the short-run, some of the...