Over the past two years, “secular stagnation” has been widely discussed within the policy community. Supporters of the secular-stagnation hypothesis believe that demand may be permanently below supply capacity, with low interest rates and inflation targets by central banks preventing real interest rates from falling to the point necessary to restore the supply and demand balance. Widening income inequality has been cited as one cause of secular stagnation. This project will develop a theoretical model to illuminate how income inequality affects aggregate income and therefore economic growth. The model has important implications for economic policy, particularly monetary policy.

Using federal income tax data, this project will investigate intragenerational income mobility in the United States. The researchers will explore the determinants of mobility—such as aging, employment history, industry trends, marriage or divorce, and geographical mobility—and examine how household income profiles respond to earnings shocks.

This research seeks to better understand how readily low-income households spend an extra dollar of income by utilizing a novel quasi-experimental design based on the uncertainty of tax refunds. A better understanding of the marginal propensity to consume at the bottom of the income distribution has important implications for the design of fiscal stimulus and unemployment insurance systems, as well as the tax system.

This project will undertake a quantitative, rigorous assessment of financial regulation in the United States, an underdeveloped area of research within the social sciences. While there is an extensive literature on regulatory politics, the focus on financial regulation has eluded many political scientists (and most economists as well). Moreover, research on the effects of unequal influence has largely focused on representation and legislation, with minimal attention paid to the final, critical step of rulemaking in the “sausage factory” of policymaking. This project will create a new database on financial rulemaking covering the past three decades, with a particular focus on the pre- and post-Dodd Frank Act. The dataset will be publically available and include rules changes, comments, and linkages of these variables to financial enforcement and appointments data. The possibilities for influencing the rules through lobbying of various sorts are enormous and may significantly contribute to economic inefficiencies, rent seeking, and inequality, which in turn have implications for growth.

U.S. states and municipalities have increasingly granted targeted financial incentives to individual firms, arguing that upfront investments by governments will lead to job creation and increased tax revenues. Yet such policies increase inter-firm inequality by targeting a subset of firms while excluding others, and can distort local economic development by shifting scarce resources to individual firms. This project will explore the implications of these policies for state and local communities—including their effects on the distribution of tax burdens, budgets, and income inequality—through data collection aimed at documenting changing patterns of government spending and taxation across U.S. cities and states.

Economic inequality research has long focused on household income and wealth or individual earnings. Recent evidence suggests that the share of total income is increasingly diverting from labor to capitol. Yet the reasons for the declining labor share of income are not yet clear. This project examines several potential causes for this decline, particularly looking at differences in skills among workers and how those skill differences affect firms’ decisions about production.