Volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state. However, although the literature on volunteering is extensive, knowledge on how life's discontinuities (life event shocks) affect volunteering is limited because most studies work with static (cross-sectional) data. To reduce...

This paper looks at the links between inequality of opportunity and views about the underlying processes that support economic success or failure. Unlike income inequality, inequality of opportunity isolates the extent to which inequality in circumstances beyond an individual's control...

Volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state. However, although the literature on volunteering is extensive, knowledge on how life’s discontinuities (life event shocks) affect volunteering is limited because most studies work with static (cross-sectional) data. To...

Using data on household balance sheets from the Survey of Consumer Finances and data on macroeconomic rates of return from Jordà et al. (2019) we construct two alternative series for household rates of return by race from 1989 to 2016. Our estimates suggest a persistent racial gap in the rate...

A growing body of research documents the importance of wealth and the racial wealth gap in perpetuating inequality across generations. We add to this literature by examining the impact of wealth on child income by race, while also extending our analysis to three generations. Our two stage least...

Using data on household balance sheets from the Survey of Consumer Finances and data on macroeconomic rates of return from Jordà et al. (2019) we construct two alternate series for household rates of return by race from 1989 to 2016. Our estimates suggest a persistent racial gap in the rate of...

In a global context, per-capita income disparities between countries persistently widen, while internal income inequality in most nations continues to increase. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz argues that such inequality is a result of deliberate political decisions. However, inequality...

This paper proposes a model of wealth distribution dynamics with a capital market imperfection and a production function where public capital is complementary to private capital. A unique invariant steady-state distribution is derived, with three social classes: subsistence workers, 'government...

One reason for the relatively poor development performance of many countries around the world today may be the high levels of inequality during and after colonisation. Evidence from colonies in the Americas suggests that skewed initial factor endowments could create small elites that own a...