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Begin New Search Political Geography North America Publishing Institution Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)

1. Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistribution

Author:
Marcel Preuss, Germán Reyes, Jason Somerville, and Joy Wu
Publication Date:
01-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
We examine how people redistribute income when there is uncertainty about the role luck plays in determining opportunities and outcomes. We elicit redistribution decisions from a U.S.- representative sample who observe worker outcomes and whether luck magnified workers’ effort (“lucky opportunities”) or determined workers’ income directly (“lucky outcomes”). We find that participants redistribute less and are less reactive to changes in the importance of luck in environments with lucky opportunities. Our findings have implications for models that seek to understand and predict redistribution attitudes, and help to explain the gap between lab evidence on support for redistribution and U.S. inequality trends.
Topic:
Inequality, Redistribution, and Income
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

2. Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistribution

Author:
Marcel Preuss, Germán Reyes, Jason Somerville, and Joy Wu
Publication Date:
01-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
We examine how people redistribute income when there is uncertainty about the role luck plays in determining opportunities and outcomes. We elicit redistribution decisions from a U.S.- representative sample who observe worker outcomes and whether luck magnified workers’ effort (“lucky opportunities”) or determined workers’ income directly (“lucky outcomes”). We find that participants redistribute less and are less reactive to changes in the importance of luck in environments with lucky opportunities. Our findings have implications for models that seek to understand and predict redistribution attitudes, and help to explain the gap between lab evidence on support for redistribution and U.S. inequality trends.
Topic:
Inequality, Economy, Redistribution, and Income
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

3. Robots, Exports and Top Income Inequality: Evidence for the U.S.

Author:
Andrés César, Guillermo Falcone, and Pablo Garriga
Publication Date:
12-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
The last decades have witnessed a revolution in manufacturing production characterized by increasing technology adoption and a strong expansion of international trade. Simultaneously, the income distribution has exhibited both polarization and concentration among the richest. Combining datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, the International Federation of Robotics, EU KLEMS, and COMTRADE, we study the causal effect of industrial automation on income inequality in the U.S. during 2010–2015. We exploit spatial and time variations in exposure to robots arising from past differences in industry specialization across U.S. metropolitan areas and the evolution of robot adoption across industries. We document a robust positive impact of robotics on income for only the top 1 percent of taxpayers, which is largest for top income fractiles. Therefore, industrial automation fuels income inequality and, particularly, top income inequality. According to our estimates, one more robot per thousand workers results in relative increments of the total taxable income accruing to fractiles P99 to P99.9, P99.9 to P99.99 and P99.99 to P100, of 2.1 percent, 3.5 percent and 5.9 percent, respectively. We also find that robotization leads to increased exports to high-income and upper-middle-income economies, and that this is one of the key mechanisms behind the surge in top income inequality.
Topic:
Income Inequality, Exports, Automation, and Robotics
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

4. Routinization and Employment: Evidence for Latin America

Author:
Leonardo Gasparini, Irene Brambilla, Guillermo Falcone, Carlo Lombardo, and Andres Cesar
Publication Date:
03-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
We study changes in employment by occupations characterized by different degree of exposure to routinization in the six largest Latin American economies over the last two decades. We combine our own indicators of routine task content based on information from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIACC) with labor market microdata from harmonized national household surveys. We find that the increase in jobs was decreasing in the automatability of the tasks typically performed in each occupation, and increasing in the initial wage, a pattern more consistent with the traditional skill-biased technological change than with the polarization hypothesis.
Topic:
Labor Issues, Employment, Automation, and Job Creation
Political Geography:
South America, Latin America, and North America

5. Do Credit Supply Shocks Affect Employment in Middle-Income Countries?

Author:
Emilio Gutierrez, David Jaume, and Martin Tobal
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
This paper studies the extent to which increases in bank credit supply available for small and medium firms can foster formal employment in Mexico. We use a detailed dataset containing loan-level information for all loans extended by commercial banks to private firms in Mexico during the 2010-2016 period, when the economy was relatively stable. To obtain exogenous variation in credit supply, we exploit differences in the regional presence of Mexican banks across local labor markets by combining pre-existing market shares with national-level changes in banks’ credit supply, after accounting for local credit demand shocks. Then, we use employment registry data to compare changes in the number of formal workers registered by small and medium firms in local labor markets differently exposed to these shocks. We find that credit supply shocks have a large impact on formal employment: a positive credit shock of one standard deviation increases yearly employment growth by 0.45 percentage points (13 percent of the mean). Our results differ from the null to small effects identified by previous literature for developed countries, suggesting that credit supply shocks play a more prominent role for employment creation (and destruction) in low and middle-income countries.
Topic:
Labor Issues, Employment, and Credit
Political Geography:
North America and Mexico

6. Tracing the Local Impacts of Exports on Poverty and Inequality: The Case of Mexico

Author:
Hernan Winkler
Publication Date:
11-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS)
Abstract:
Evidence about the effect of exports on welfare at the local level is scarce. Using a unique dataset of international trade and poverty maps for almost 2,000 Mexican municipalities between 2004 and 2014, the study presented in this paper provides new evidence on the impact of a significant rise in exports on poverty and inequality at the local level. The analysis implements an instrumental variable approach that combines the initial structure of exports across municipalities with global trends in exports from developing to developed countries by sector. The results show that a 10 percent increase in the ratio of exports to workers reduces income inequality measured by the Gini coefficient by 0.17 points (using a 0 to 100 scale), but no significant effects on poverty reduction or average household incomes are identified. The lack of impacts on average incomes is driven by a rise in the supply of labor at the local level because municipalities with higher export growth experienced an increase in labor force participation and attracted more net migration, particularly of unskilled workers. Therefore, while total labor incomes grew in response to an increase in exports, average labor incomes per worker did not change. Declining remittances also blunted the effect of growing exports on household incomes.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Migration, Poverty, Inequality, and Local
Political Geography:
North America and Mexico