Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

International trade as critical parameter of COVID-19 spread that outclasses demographic, economic, environmental, and pollution factors.

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/6067354.pdf

Political Choice Matters: Explaining the Strength of Class and Religious Cleavages in Cross-National Perspective

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. Using a novel technique—tracking family names over generations to measure social mobility across countries and periods—renowned economic historian Gregory Clark reveals that mobility rates are lower than conventionally estimated, do not vary across societies, and are resistant to social policies. The good news is that these patterns are driven by strong inheritance of abilities and lineage does not beget unwarranted advantage. The bad news is that much of our fate is predictable from lineage. Clark argues that since a greater part of our place in the world is predetermined, we must avoid creating winner-take-all societies. Clark examines and compares surnames in such diverse cases as modern Sweden, fourteenth-century England, and Qing Dynasty China. He demonstrates how fate is determined by ancestry and that almost all societies—as different as the modern United States, Communist China, and modern Japan—have similarly low social mobility rates. These figures are impervious to institutions, and it takes hundreds of years for descendants to shake off the advantages and disadvantages of their ancestors. For these reasons, Clark contends that societies should act to limit the disparities in rewards between those of high and low social rank. Challenging popular assumptions about mobility and revealing the deeply entrenched force of inherited advantage, The Son Also Rises is sure to prompt intense debate for years to come.

Introduction [The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility]

Does regional integration improve economic resilience? Evidence from urban agglomerations in China

Predicting the Spread of COVID-19 in Italy using Machine Learning: Do Socio-Economic Factors Matter?

In the last 20 years Italy has experienced major political upheavals, which have been explained by a variety of political and social processes. This paper analyses the role played by economic condi...

/pdf/inequality-and-voting-in-italy-s-regions-1lbaenybps.pdf

Inequality and voting in Italy’s regions

Using an innovative dataset built by merging survey and administrative data, we provide new estimates of intergenerational earnings’ inequality between fathers and sons in Italy, extending previous evidence in several directions. We rely on the TSTSLS method to predict fathers’ earnings and compute intergenerational elasticities and imputed rank–rank slopes, trying to reduce estimation biases. Confirming previous evidence, we find that Italy is characterized by a high intergenerational inequality in cross‐country comparison. Extending previous analyses, we show that the intergenerational association increases when sons at older ages and multi‐annual averages of pseudo‐fathers’ and sons’ earnings are considered. We also find that the intergenerational persistence differs across geographical macro‐areas and is high also for daughters, especially when family earnings are considered. Furthermore, estimates where possible mediating factors of the parental influence are included among the covariates show that a high intergenerational association persists when sons’ education and occupation are controlled for.

Intergenerational Earnings Inequality: New Evidence From Italy

The evolution of voting in Italy’s general elections from 1994 to 2018 is investigated in this paper at the regional level, exploring the role of inequality, changes in incomes, wealth levels, precarisation of jobs and unemployment. Using a novel regional database combining voting results, incomes of employees and household revenues and wealth, we explore the drivers of non-voting, and of the shares of votes for mainstream parties, Lega and Five Star Movement in total electors. The results of our econometric models show that inequality, lack of wealth and precarisation are closely associated to the regional patterns of Italy’s electoral change. While political, ideological and cultural variables are important factors in Italy’s political upheaval, economic conditions appear to play a key role.

Inequality and elections in Italian regions

Much of the global evidence on intergenerational income mobility is based on sub-optimal data. In particular, two-stage techniques are widely used to impute parental incomes for analyses of developing countries and for estimating long-run trends across multiple generations and historical periods. We propose a machine learning method that may improve the reliability and comparability of such estimates. Our approach minimizes the out-of-sample prediction error in the parental income imputation, which provides an objective criterion for choosing across different specifications of the first-stage equation. We apply the method to data from the United States and South Africa to show that under common conditions it can limit the bias generally associated to mobility estimates based on imputed parental income.

Francesco Bloise

Papers

Predicting the Spread of COVID-19 in Italy using Machine Learning: Do Socio-Economic Factors Matter?

Inequality and voting in Italy’s regions

Intergenerational Earnings Inequality: New Evidence From Italy

Inequality and elections in Italian regions

Estimating intergenerational income mobility on sub-optimal data: a machine learning approach