We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

Utility Analysis and the Consumption Function: An Interpretation of Cross-Section Data

Geography and Trade

This paper describes the correlations between inequality and the growth rates in cross-country data. Using non-parametric methods, we show that the growth rate is an inverted U-shaped function of net changes in inequality: Changes in inequality (in any direction) are associated with reduced growth in the next period. The estimated relationship is robust to variations in control variables and estimation methods. This inverted U-curve is consistent with a simple political economy model, although, as we point out, efforts to interpret this model causally run into difficult identification problems. We show that this non-linearity is sufficient to explain why previous estimates of the relationship between the level of inequality and growth are so different from one another.

Inequality and Growth: What Can the Data Say?

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 414 pages, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.I LOVE THESE GUYS''(Joseph Stiglitz) is an insanely great economist,'' so writes Paul R. Krugman, who should know. These two like to write books for the populace at large on the topic of macroeconomics. Krugman also likes to spout offon Sunday news shows like ''Meet the Press,'' and on all the cable news programs. You can see Krugman arguing with Bill O'Reilly on Meet the Press. From YouTube: ''Don't call me a liar, pal, that's what you do all the time,'' says O'Reilly; ''This is not your show, so you can't cut offmy mic,'' says Krugman. Judging by their expressions, I was glad Tim Russert (6- 3-) was there in the studio at the time to protect Krugman (5- 7-) (O'Reilly stands 6- 4-). Conservative pundits dislike both economists, but pretty much leave Stiglitz alone.Krugman makes it a point to stay out of government affairs. Stiglitz does just the opposite, and he sometimes gets burned. Stiglitz was part of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and was Chief Economist for the World Bank. After much criticism of the way the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conducted lending to developing countries, he was pretty much fired from the World Bank. Comparing the two, you would have to say that Stiglitz is more the bleeding heart, while Krugman says that what he dislikes most is the dishonesty he sees in political-economic discourse. Both are champions of the common man.Since Stiglitz can make the very valid claim for being ''an insanely great economist,'' most everything he says in his books should be taken seriously. There are some real gems in this book. I especially like the perspective he lends to some of the more peculiar things that happened before, during, and after the financial crisis. People hear about these things in the news from some announcer who makes them sound like just more news-bites, but they are, after all, unprecedented (and largely absurd). Take ''robo-signing'' for instance (page 198).WHAT GOES FOR NEWSRobo-signing was part of what happened during the foreclosure process after the massive numbers of defaults of subprime mortgages. Big banks intentionally did not follow mandated law. Apart from ignoring debtors' rights, an ensuing mess followed. Robo-signing was nothing less than a blatant attempt at rewriting property law, and resulted in lying to the courts about the state of each property's title, literally hundreds of times. No bank officer was charged with a crime. By contrast, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s led to 829 individual convictions and 650 prison sentences. Nowadays the big banks just pay fines as part of settlements where they admit no guilt, and it's just part of doing business.Take algorithmic or ''flash'' trading in the stock exchanges (page 164). These are buys and sales made in nanoseconds on the basis of extracting information from the patterns of prices and trades. Nothing like real information gathered through market research on an industry, or on a firm in a certain industry, backs up these trades. But traders swear that ''price discovery'' is happening this way, and that all this backs up the efficient markets model. So on May 6, 2010 stock prices plummeted to a point where the Dow Jones temporarily lost 10% of its value. There are reasons to believe that these trades ''make markets not just more volatile but also less 'informative' '' (page 166). Still, the talk on the street is all about efficient markets (echoing Alan Greenspan's failures at the Federal Reserve).Take failed privatizations. When electric power in California was liberalized and Enron manipulated prices and public power to its advantage, this was a story about the company's accounting practices, not about privatizing something that had no business being privatized. …

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

In the last two decades more than 120 countries have adopted a version of a Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF). These are budget institutions whose rationale it is to enable the central government to make credible multi-year fiscal commitments. This paper analyzes a newly-collected dataset of worldwide MTEF adoptions during 1990-2008. It exploits within-country variation in MTEF adoption in a dynamic panel framework to estimate their impacts. The analysis finds that MTEFs strongly improve fiscal discipline, with more advanced MTEF phases having a larger impact. Higher-phase MTEFs also improve allocative efficiency. Only top-phase MTEFs have a significantly positive effect on technical efficiency.

/pdf/mtefs-and-fiscal-performance-panel-data-evidence-rowd2kg5j2.pdf

MTEFs and fiscal performance: panel data evidence

Economic contractions are generally associated with increases in NPL ratios. However, despite the common assumption used in the empirical literature of homogenous impact across banks, the strength of this relationship is often bank-specific, and imposing homogeneity may lead to over- or underestimating the resilience of the financial system to macroeconomic woes. We introduce a three-stage approach to generate forecasts of macro-financial variables and project non-performing loans (NPLs) in a way that accounts for banks’ heterogeneous reactions to macro-financial shocks in a dynamic context and for potential cross-sectional dependence across banks caused by common shocks. An application to Ecuador suggests that both substantial heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence are present and that should be taken into account when trying to anticipate inflections in the quality of the portfolio.

/pdf/macro-financial-linkages-and-heterogeneous-non-performing-4gnx9qa3wq.pdf

Macro-financial linkages and heterogeneous non-performing loans projections: An application to Ecuador

Using high-frequency proxies for economic activity over a large sample of countries, we show that the economic crisis during the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic was only partly due to government lockdowns. Economic activity also contracted severely because of voluntary social distancing in response to higher infections. Furthermore, we show that lockdowns substantially reduced COVID-19 cases, especially if they were introduced early in a country's epidemic. This implies that, despite involving short-term economic costs, lockdowns may pave the way to a faster recovery by containing the spread of the virus and reducing voluntary social distancing. Finally, we document that lockdowns entail decreasing marginal economic costs but increasing marginal benefits in reducing infections. This suggests that tight short-lived lockdowns are preferable to mild prolonged measures. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2021.

Protecting Lives and Livelihoods with Early and Tight Lockdowns

Advanced economies are in the midst of a major demographic transition, with the number of elderly rising precipitously relative to the working-age population. Yet, despite the acceleration in demographic shifts in the past decade, advanced economies experienced markedly different trajectories in overall labor force participation rates and the workforce attachment of men and women. Using a cohort-based model of labor force participation for 17 advanced economies estimated over the 1985-2016 period, we document a significant role of common patterns of participation over the life cycle and shifts in these patterns across generations for aggregate labor supply, especially in the case of women. The entry of new cohorts of women led to upward shifts in the age participation pro le, boosting aggregate participation rates. However, this process plateaued in most advanced economies, with signs of reversal in some. Using the model's results to forecast future participation trends, we project sizable declines in aggregate participation rates over the next three decades due to the aging of the population. Illustrative simulations show that implementing policies encouraging labor supply can help attenuate but may not fully offset demographic pressures.

/pdf/a-cohort-based-analysis-of-labor-force-participation-for-9kdw2vahmm.pdf

A Cohort-Based Analysis of Labor Force Participation for Advanced Economies

Mainland Portugal lays on a stable continental region characterized by slow tectonic rates. However, the region has been the source of moderate to large magnitude earthquakes in historical times. Remarkable seismic activity has also been recorded in the instrumental period. A clearly asymmetric distribution of earthquakes between north and south is observed. The Alentejo region (south Portugal) presents belts of high epicenter density and delimits a transition between a nearly aseismic zone, to the northeast, and an area with significant seismic activity to the south. Earthquake clusters are located within an area where the relation between small earthquakes (ML<4), tectonics and lithospheric rheology is not obvious.

Francesco Grigoli

Papers

MTEFs and fiscal performance: panel data evidence

Macro-financial linkages and heterogeneous non-performing loans projections: An application to Ecuador

Protecting Lives and Livelihoods with Early and Tight Lockdowns

A Cohort-Based Analysis of Labor Force Participation for Advanced Economies

Seismicity of a slow deforming environment: Alentejo, south Portugal